KillerSites Blog

Is HTML a scripting language?

August 24, 2006

I’ve seen this confusion come up from time to time – is HTML a scripting language?

Short answer: no.

Yes a nerd detail, but nonetheless, this is something that should be made clear.

THE DETAILS:

HTML is actually a markup language and not a scripting language.

Scripting implies decision making capabilities (the code can actually evaluate and take an action based on what it finds) – PHP, PERL, Ruby, Javascript are examples of scripting languages.

Markup languages create structure for a document … they only describe data. For example:

  • HTML
  • XHTML
  • XML

… but you knew that already.

[;)]

Stefan Mischook