Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

As an outgrowth of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), HTML is generally viewed as nothing more than a document formatting, or tagging, language. The tags (inside <> delimiter characters) instruct a viewer program (the browser or, more generically, the client) how to display chunks of text or images.

Relegating HTML to the category of a tagging language does disservice not only to the effort that goes into fashioning a first-rate Web page, but also to the way users interact with the pages. To my way of thinking, any collection of commands and other syntax that directs the way users interact with digital information is programming.

With HTML, a Web page author controls the user experience with the content just as the engineers who program Microsoft Excel craft the way users interact with spreadsheet content and functions. Recent enhancements to the published standards for HTML (HTML 4.0 and later) endeavor to define more narrowly the purpose of HTML to assign context to content, leaving the appearance to a separate standard for style sheets. In other words, it’s not HTML’s role to signify that some text is italic, but rather to signify why it is italic. (For example, you tag a chunk of text that conveys emphasis regardless of how the style sheet or browser sets the appearance of that emphasized text.) The most interactivity that HTML lets authors play with is associated with fill-in-the-blank forms. Browsers display text boxes, radio buttons, checkboxes, and select lists in response to HTML tags for those types of form controls. But that’s as far as HTML goes. Any processing of the choices or information entered into the form by the user is the job of other technologies, such as programs on the server or client-side scripts.