5 Comments on “What are the major differences between HTML and other programming languages?”

1. StonedGorilla
   December 28th, 2006 at 9:28 am

   HTML isn’t really a programming language. As the name suggests, it’s a markup language which tells the browser how to format a page.

   xHTML is the standard for creating a website. You may use a PHP and MySQL backend if you have dynamic pages, but HTML (and CSS) will be used to create the frontend.

   Java and C++ are languages for creating programs, not websites.

2. computerbp13
   December 31st, 2006 at 3:42 pm

   HTML is simpler in it’s own way, but still very complex. HTML is graphical design while C and C++ (and php and so fourth) are programming languages for accomplishing tasks and not writing and designing web pages. You can’t make a website in any other language besides HTML so you’d best learn it before designing a site. I consider HTML programming, but some people may not.
   To learn HTML see my tutorials:

3. rowlfe
   December 31st, 2006 at 5:32 pm

   Programming implies a device, a microprocessor, the CPU. Programming languages tell the CPU what to do. In the case of HTML, the language tells a browser what to do to display text on the screen and has nothing to do with telling the CPU what to do. The browser is just another application. You might say it is a programming language of sorts because it does consist of instructions which are interpreted and executed. Like ANY language, it consists of a set of keywords which cause specific actions to be carried out when the interpreter sees the keyword in the data stream. In that sense, interpreted keywords, HTML is identical to any other language. Learn the set of keywords and you learn the language.

4. makg
   December 31st, 2006 at 9:56 pm

   HTML’s main purpose is to build the look of a web page. Other languages build the action behind the web page. Take for example a web page for a feedback form — some way of sending comments to a web site owner. HTML would lay out how the page looks, and build the boxes you would type in. Java or PHP (or I suppose c++) would handle what happens after you hit “submit” to send that information. So when I build a web page that does something, it usually uses both HTML and another language (PHP in my case) to make it work. For a car analogy — HTML is the paint job and body work, and another programming language is the engine and drive shaft.

   Is HTML programming? I don’t know — it is a set of instructions that tells a computer to do something, so I suppose so. And it can be quite complicated. But it doesn’t really have the flexibility (computationally or logically) of what I would typically think of as a programming language.

5. Scott Grafton
   January 1st, 2007 at 3:44 pm

   To keep it simple, after I learnt HTML, the next logical step was learning Javascript; it is just a way to make your website more functional

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