Forums | MacLife

I wouldn't call HTML "code" if I was talking to programmers, CS majors, or anyone I know that's into actual coding.  But for the layman, calling it "code" is more or less the norm.  They see all sorts of unfamiliar markup characters mixed with some text, it doesn't make sense to them, so they call it code.  Hell, I've even heard it called computer programming.

In short, technically it's not "code," but that doesn't mean your buddy isn't being a bit pedantic about it.

Aqua Man wrote:

In short, technically it's not "code," but that doesn't mean your buddy isn't being a bit pedantic about it.

I believe that Pedantic is his middle name.

My standards of what is "proper" or not got much more relaxed when they allowed the word "yo" in Scrabble. So I'll go on calling HTML code, if for no other reason than to annoy programmers.   and my pedantic friend.

Last edited by Pithecanthropus (2009-07-22 10:19 am)

It is "a" code, but when computer coders say code they mean programming in a computer language.

EDIT: Lots of things in life act as functions, for instance your bar-code reader at the store, but using it is not programming.  And you can't actually write any functions of your own in HTML.

Last edited by Metacell (2009-07-22 8:09 pm)

sturner wrote:

XML is code.

There is a tenuous relationship between HTML and XML, and SGML. All are code, all are languages.

I disagree. XML is a markup language, just like HTML. It describes a set of parameters and completely static. There is no input or output to HTML, XML, or anything else that's similar. Instead, it is the input to something that does something with it. (a web browser for HTML, any program for XML) You can have code embedded in HTML, though, such as PHP or JavaScript. Since both PHP and JavaScript can dynamically make decisions based on input and output something different, they are code.

Metacell wrote:

It is "a" code, but when computer coders say code they mean programming in a computer language.

I've coded in C, C++, C#, java, php, perl, javascript, and various other programming and scripting languages, and I refer to HTML as code.

EDIT: Lots of things in life act as functions, for instance your bar-code reader at the store, but using it is not programming.  And you can't actually write any functions of your own in HTML.

HTML tags act as functions because you input information which is then output depending on what you entered.

Using a barcode scanner is not programming, but designing a barcode scanner and the barcodes that will be used with that barcode scanner *is* programming.

By using CSS it is possible to drastically (or even sometimes completely) alter the way that input is handled by HTML tags. Tags which were designed to display text can be altered to display images. Tags which were designed to display images can be altered to display text. Tags which were designed to display information in blocks can be altered to display them as lines. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

matt wrote:

HTML tags act as functions because you input information which is then output depending on what you entered.

I disagree. The information in tags are attributes, which describe the tag. It isn't the same as the input to a function because it's static. If HTML (by itself, not counting additions like JavaScript or PHP) were able to load in data elsewhere and modify its behavior based on that, then it would be "coding". Instead it's just a bunch of data that's the input to a browser and cannot modify its own behavior.

I'll put it another way. Writing HTML is the same thing as writing a document in a word processor, the only difference is instead of writing tags you press a button. Though pressing a button is obviously easier, it's still essentially the same as writing a tag since there's a perfect one to one relationship between the two actions. However, I don't think anybody in their right mind would call writing a document in Word "coding".

Well sure, but so is writing in shorthand or designing a needlepoint pattern.