Forrest wrote:
drunk wrote:
What you say of HTML goes true for almost all programming languages (arguably all, Java was supposed to be platform independant though...) as well. It's more accurate to say that the programming languages resemble real languages than the other way around, however. Languages came before programming.
I picked HTML specifically because it's a particularly poignant problem. Most proper programming languages really ought to compile the same in any compiler (given the same libraries available and all that stuff); though compiler-tailored optimisations may not optimise like you had planned, the resulting binary really should be the same thing. If it's not, we'd like to say that compiler is broken somehow.
With HTML, no browser renders the same thing exactly the same way and while ostensibly this is a problem (i.e. we give lip service to "grr why can't people stick to standards"), in practice it's just taken for granted and worked around. You can't just write standard HTML perfectly to spec and trust that it will work as it should, cause no two browsers will treat it the same way. But we don't go off about "wtf web browsers are broken" and raise a big noise about it, we just say "browsers render things differently, deal with it".
1. HTML is not a
programming language.
2. HTML's problem is not that different browsers render it differently
3. programming languages are a bad comparison to spoken languages
Programming languages have a well-defined syntax and semantics for defining algorithms. HTML has a well-defined syntax for giving formatting
hints to text (and images).
HTML was never meant to be rendered identically in all browsers. It was never even meant to be rendered identically in one browser. I can change the browser window size or font sizes to match my screen resolution and physical size. If you want to specify the layout down to a pixel, use PostScript or PDF. The main problems with HTML are:
1. Too many "web designers" think they can or should define a layout down to a pixel, ignoring user preferences.
2. Most HTML you'll find on the web is not syntactically correct, and different browsers react to the errors in different ways.
3. While there is a specification for HTML (I'm including CSS here), no browser implements the full specification.
There is some sense in comparing HTML to a spoken language. There are plenty of HTML dialects for different browsers, and you can speak HTML on different levels (with just simple formatting instructions, or pixel-specific formatting). But the discussion here drifted towards "is there a complete specification of what is correct". With HTML, there is. With a language, there isn't.
And why the hell am I writing about HTML and programming languages in a web comic forum?
I'll call it a day now...