HTML: a programming language, not mere markup

9 January 2025

Because HTML looks easy and lacks features like formal conditional logic and Turing-completeness, it’s often dismissed as not a programming language. “That’s not real code; it’s just markup” is a common refrain. Now, I’m no stranger to the austere beauty of the command line, from automating scripts to training machine-learning models. But underestimating HTML is a mistake.

I might venture to say that the HTML of today is more like a programming language, than the HTML I began working with (and sort of continue to do so) back in the late nineties. Some web designers of the day were adamant HTML was markup, not code (which I sometimes labelled it as), and certainly not a programming language.

HTML gave online life to all manner of web creative’s ideas, how could people fail to see this?

<sarcasm on> Oh now satisfying it is to be vindicated all these years later. </sarcasm off>