alt Hacker NewsI dunno, you're being pedantic :) Yes yes, the name clearly ends up "Markup Language" so yeah, with a very strict definition of programming languages, HTML is not one of them.
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.
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One threshold is "can you write a program that might not complete?" You can't in SQL, which makes it less of a programming language than, say, FORTRAN.
If you look at the HTML 5 spec it is clear that it's intended to be a substrate for applications. The HTML 5 spec could be factored into a specification of the DOM, specification of an x-language API for the DOM and a specification for a serialization format as well as bindings of that x-language API to specific languages like Javascript.
> I dunno, you're being pedantic :)
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.
I'm not sure we can call your parent comment pedantic. They're just being correct. Is it pedantic to say that fish is not a fruit? It's just correct to do so.
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.