Heydon Pickering avatar Heydon Pickering

Is HTML A Programming Language?

Screenshot of “Is HTML A Programming Language?”

Heydon released a new Webbed Briefs episode, always entertaining!

In this episode, I ask a question that has never been asked before and has certainly not in any way caused a great number of arguments and nobody has ever been blocked or muted on social media for asking it. Bon appétit.


  1. For language changes inside a paragraph, MDN suggests we can use the i element:
    https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/i

    That's what I thought was one of the new use cases for i.

    A @[email protected] page about “Declaring language in HTML” (so @[email protected] ?) says we should use a span, div or bdi:
    https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-language-declarations.en#usingspan

    So no i after all?