Re: Two questions

Hi,

I think this question belongs in the basics list. Anyway I'm sure you'll
receive a lot more answers there, but not to disappoint you, here goes.

HTML is a markup language. It is not a typical programmatic language that
makes logic decisions. It is a presentation language telling the browser the
specific layout of a webpage / HTML page. However it is the browser's
decision to lay out the page as it desires.

CSS is also a markup language. One cannot call these languages as much as
configurations. Sort of like typesetting a document. If you look at
languages like TeX which also allow logic into the typesetting, you see how
HTML does not at all aspire to be even that.

The primary reason may have been that at the time HTML evolved from SGML it
was felt that programmatic manipulations would not have to be done on the
client side. After all the earliest goal of HTML was only to allow a
hypermedia environment.

Ofcourse the need for programmatic support was soon felt, and that is what
you get with JavaScript, Java applets and ActiveX components to name a few.

HTH,

-Srini


----- Original Message -----
From: Sara Winters <saraw(at)fcs.net>
To: <hwg-languages(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2000 12:41 AM
Subject: Two questions


: Hello,
:
: I have two questions:
:
: 1)  HTML - I know this stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, but is this
: considered a
: computer language, web language, coding language, scripting language?  I
am
: trying to
: catagorize it.
:
: 2) CSS - Cascading Style Sheets.  Pretty much the same question as above.
: What kind
: of language is it?
:
: Neither class addressed this and I would appreciate any information.
Thank
: you.
:
: Best Regards,
:
: Sara
:
:

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