In the linked article: > you should master the HTML programming¹ language The footnote reads: > 1. This is a common debate - but for simplicity sake I'm just calling it this. It's not really a debate, HTML is a markup language [1], not a programming language: you annotate a document with its structure and its formatting. You are not really programming when you write HTML (the markup is not procedural) (and this is no…
I think that it is a debate, and it depends on the role of HTML in your system. If all you're doing is using HTML to "annotate a document with its structure and its formatting", then yes, I'll accept that it's not quite programming, but I've not seen this approach of starting with a plain non-html document and marking it up by hand done in probably over two decades. I do still occasionally see it done for marking up…
That's correct but I don't see what it has got to do with the question of whether HTML is a programming language or not.
Strings do not have control flow but strings are integral part of larger programs that have control flow. So what? That doesn't make strings any closer to being programming languages.