Decades later, I'm still mildly annoyed when I see self-closing tags in HTML. They're no longer required and they remind me of the strict XHTML dream.
EDIT: I just checked, and my site (at least the index page) still validates! https://validator.nu/?showsource=yes&doc=https%3A%2F%2Fander...
* XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 are officially deprecated by the W3C.
* XHTML5 exists as a variant of HTML5. However, it's very clear that it's absolutely not a priority for the HTML5 working groups, and there's a statement that future features will not necessarily be supported by the XHTML5 variant.
* XHTML5 does not have a DTD, so one of the main advantages of XHTML - that you can validate its correctness with pure XML functionality - isn't there.
* If you do a 'view source' in Firefox on a completely valid XHTML 1.0/1.1 page, it'll redline the XML declaration like it's something wrong. Not sure if this is intended or possibly even a bug, but it certainly gives me a 'browser tells me this is not supposed to be there' feeling.
It pretty much seems to me XHTML has been abandoned by the web community. My personal conclusion has been that whenever I touch any of my old online things still written in XHTML, I'll convert them to HTML5.
> you should master the HTML programming¹ language
The footnote reads:
> 1. This is a common debate - but for simplicity sake I'm just calling it this.
It's not really a debate, HTML is a markup language [1], not a programming language: you annotate a document with its structure and its formatting. You are not really programming when you write HTML (the markup is not procedural) (and this is not gatekeeping, there's nothing wrong about this and doesn't make HTML a lesser language).
To avoid the issue completely, you can phrase this as: "you should master HTML" and remove the footnote. Simple, clean, concise, clear. By the way, ML already means "Markup Language", so any "HTML .* language" phrasing can feel a bit off.
If all you're doing is using HTML to "annotate a document with its structure and its formatting", then yes, I'll accept that it's not quite programming, but I've not seen this approach of starting with a plain non-html document and marking it up by hand done in probably over two decades. I do still occasionally see it done for marking up blog posts or documentation into markdown and then generating html from it, but even that's a minuscule part of what HTML is used for these days.
Your mileage my vary, but what I and people around me typically do is work on hundreds/thousands of loosely coupled small snippets of HTML used within e.g. React JSX, or Django/Jinja templates or htmx endpoints, in order to dynamically control data and state in a large program. In this sense, while the html itself doesn't have control flow, it is an integral part of control flow in the larger system, and it's extremely likely that I'll break something in the functionality if I carelessly change an element's type or attribute value. In this sense, I'm not putting on a different hat when I'm working on the html, but just working on a different part of the program.
Those are not HTML. PHP neither, even when used as a templating language for HTML.
> htmx endpoints
Not really familiar with htmx, but I would say this is HTML augmented with some additional mechanisms. I don't know how I would describe this augmented HTML, but I'm not applying my "not programming" statement to htmx (I probably could, but I haven't given enough thoughts to do it).
> In this sense, I'm not putting on a different hat when I'm working on the html, but just working on a different part of the program.
I agree with this actually. I wouldn't consider that writing HTML (or CSS) is really a separate activity when I'm building some web app.
That's correct but I don't see what it has got to do with the question of whether HTML is a programming language or not.
Strings do not have control flow but strings are integral part of larger programs that have control flow. So what? That doesn't make strings any closer to being programming languages.
<for i=0; i<1; i++> <html> </html> </for>
Better question, why don't we upgrade XML to do that?
But if you disagree with this, or somehow work around this statement by replacing your for element with some "for-loop" custom element (it is valid HTML to add custom tags with dashes in their names), my stronger argument is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743219#46743554
But if we use a broader definition, basically "a formal language that specifies behavior a machine must execute", then HTML is indeed a programming language.
HTML is not only about annotating documents or formatting, it can do things you expect from a "normal" programming language too, for example, you can do constraints validation:
<input name="token" required pattern="[A-Z]{3}-\d{4}" title="Must match ABC-1234 (3 uppercase letters, hyphen, 4 digits)" placeholder="ABC-1234">
In the end, I agree with you, HTML ultimately is a markup language, but it's deceiving, because it does more than just markup.
It might be, I'm usually not, but this is all xhtml.club and this footnote are about, might as well be correct :-)
Constraint validation is still descriptive (what is allowed)
All details and summary are doing is conveying information on what's a summary and what's the complete story, and it has this hidden / shown behavior.
In any case, you will probably find something procedural / programming like in HTML, but it's not the core idea of the language, and if you are explaining what HTML is to a newbie, I feel like you should focus to the essential. Then we can discuss the corners between more experienced people.
In the end, all I'm saying is: you can just avoid issues and just say "HTML" without further qualifying it.
If anything, it is the act of stretching the definition of "programming language" so much that it includes HTML as a programming language that we should call pedantic.
To quote [0]:
> All those “Valid XHTML 1.0!” links on the web are really saying “Invalid HTML 4.01!”.
Although the article is 20 years old now, so these days it’s actually HTML5.
Edit: Checked the other member sites. Only two are served as application/xhtml+xml.
[0]: https://webkit.org/blog/68/understanding-html-xml-and-xhtml/
There is no HTML5. It's just a buzzword. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/introduction.html#is-this-h...?
> Is this HTML5?
> In short: Yes.
See also [1].
That HTML5 was used in marketing doesn't make the technical term disappear. HTML5 is a bit more precise than HTML, it refers to the living standard that's currently in use, as opposed to HTML 4.01 and the previous versions of HTML.
Not having it is XHTML compliant though, so it could just be removed.
I don’t thing it’s about luddites as website mentioned. Many professions have tools suggesting that person have extensive experience and in terms of web development, XHTML or old standards of HTML are such.
I know it is unfortunately not the case, but bragging that your HTML is valid should be equivalent to being proud that your java code parses and compiles…
I would go to the lengths of stating that writing valid HTML should be a bare minimum, and then we can talk about whether to use the XML markup.
And I think few things are actually invalid HTML5.
But since browsers will happily take invalid HTML, it's nice to care about doing the right thing and ensuring your HTML is valid.
However no browsers have implemented streaming XHTML parsers. This means that the performance is notably worse for XHTML and if you rely on streaming responses (I currently do for a few pages like bulk imports) it won't work.
Dang, I hadn't considered this. That's something to add to the "simplest HTML omitting noisy tags like body and head vs going full XHTML" debate I have with myself.
One for XHTML: I like that the parser catches errors, it often prevent subtle issues.