Maybe it doesn’t matter legally speaking, but as a software engineer I would object when someone says HTML/CSS is a computer program. It just is some specially formatted text that is interpreted by browsers (which are the actual programs here).
Isn’t every high level programming language just a specially formatted text, that is interpreted by the compiler? Now for C you could say it is compiled into machine code, and the machine code is then the actual program. But what about Java using the JRE or Python and other script languages? That seems kind of similar to what browsers do, from my limited software understanding.
You could make that argument for interpreted languages, I guess.
But still I would say there is a difference between those languages and HTML. HTML just describes the layout of a website and CSS describes how this layout should be presented exactly.
What I consider a programming language (and output a “computer program”) can do stuff like perform calculations, follow some control flow (e.g. conditions, loops, etc) and can handle user input/create output dynamically.
Anyway, I’m just here to argue against people making my ad blocker illegal 🥴
True, you can technically compute anything in CSS with enough hacks—but if your boss asks you to implement a sorting algorithm in CSS, it’s probably time to question their sanity. So I acknowledge the “well akchually”, but still stand by my previous point😅
Maybe it doesn’t matter legally speaking, but as a software engineer I would object when someone says HTML/CSS is a computer program. It just is some specially formatted text that is interpreted by browsers (which are the actual programs here).
Isn’t every high level programming language just a specially formatted text, that is interpreted by the compiler? Now for C you could say it is compiled into machine code, and the machine code is then the actual program. But what about Java using the JRE or Python and other script languages? That seems kind of similar to what browsers do, from my limited software understanding.
You could make that argument for interpreted languages, I guess. But still I would say there is a difference between those languages and HTML. HTML just describes the layout of a website and CSS describes how this layout should be presented exactly. What I consider a programming language (and output a “computer program”) can do stuff like perform calculations, follow some control flow (e.g. conditions, loops, etc) and can handle user input/create output dynamically.
Anyway, I’m just here to argue against people making my ad blocker illegal 🥴
This is my *well akchually" moment of the day: CSS is technically turing complete and thus should be counted as a programming language
True, you can technically compute anything in CSS with enough hacks—but if your boss asks you to implement a sorting algorithm in CSS, it’s probably time to question their sanity. So I acknowledge the “well akchually”, but still stand by my previous point😅