[Sigia-l] HTML is not a programming language

[karl fast]

> HTML is not a programming language. This isn't because it's a markup
> language since, essentially, Postscript is a markup language *and* a
> programming language (each character is its own subroutine). 

Yes.

HTML is descriptive markup. Postscript is procedural markup and this
brings it into the realm of programming languages. 

I remember hearing a talk by Tim Bray a few years ago about the
different types of markup languages (an expert in this area if there
ever was one) and he went to great lengths to explain that there was
a big difference between structural and descriptive markup languages
(like XML and SGML) and procedural markup languages like PostScript.


> Difficultly or whatever has nothing to do with it - VB and
> Javascript (there's no space, technically it should be known as
> ECMAscript nowadays) are probably easier to program than Lyx which
> is 'just' a markup language.

An excellent point.



--karl