Are you a coding freak? But wondering if HTML would be a good choice to pick up or not? Don’t worry you are just in the correct place started. Read this full article to find out if HTML is a programming language or not.
Being honest, this topic of whether HTML is a programming language or not its worth a group discussion. Many companies coming for the campus drive even question this to the candidates to grill them a little. Nevertheless, I’ll tell you in this article what the real scenarios are, so read on to find out!!!
What’s a Programming Language?
What comes first when you hear the word programming? No, no don’t scare away I won’t ask you interview questions, anyway. I’m sure that you relate programming to sets of words written in English or other languages to instruct the computer to perform some tasks. Well yes, you are somewhat correct. However, the worldwide accepted definition of a programming language is that it is actually a set of instructions, commands, and syntax used to develop a software program.
Now, there are low-level languages and high-level languages. The languages which are easily understandable by the computers without requiring any translation are the low-level languages. While the languages which are written in English or other human understandable form and require a compiler or interpreter to translate them into machine language are called High-level languages.
What’s HTML and it’s Industrial Importance?
HTML is basically a declarative language, which means that it is related to the displaying part of a content (i.e. content of the web pages generally) only and not instructing the computer on how to function.
HTML stands for Hypertext markup language. It is the standard markup language that is used to describe the content and the format of the web pages (documents designed to be displayed in the web browser) using the tags. HTML tags are used as the syntax to create the content of a web page.
The Markup languages might be ideal for those who are new in the development area and might not have way too much deep knowledge about computer codes and actual programming. Markup languages generally use tags for instruction to be performed by the computer during the execution of the document’s elements. The tags used are in human-readable form and they contain standard words instead of the actual syntax which is used in programming languages.
Industrial Importance of HTML
HTML is the king of web content development. As this markup language is basically used for putting up the content on the webpages, it forms a crucial role in web development. HTML along with CSS and JavaScript is the core of any website development. Also, without HTML, CSS and JavaScript have no value as HTML is the main file supporting the other two.
Is HTML a Programming Language or Not?
Technically speaking HTML is a markup language but not a programming language. HTML is primarily concerned with the content of the webpages and not directly with the functioning of a computer.
HTML does not meet the standards of a Turing-complete language!! Turing-complete language means that it’s capable of turning machine emulation. That is, these types of languages are capable of actively changing the system states of a computer. However, HTML fails to do so and thus is not accepted as the programming language by many developers and programmers. Nevertheless, HTML along with JavaScript, which renders the functionality features to HTML, are together considered to be a single Turing-complete language. But as a matter of fact, it requires an extra effort on the developers’ side to learn two languages simultaneously because HTML or JavaScript individually isn’t enough.
I hope this post was informative and you are able to understand why HTML isn’t a programming language. But whether HTML is a programming language or not, its demand is really very high in the web development market as in the Web, content, and information are only what matters more to the googlers!!
