[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

You write your comment as though I'm suggesting the HTML file is executed because it contains a script element. I'm not; an HTML file with no script tag, say just the text "Hello world!"[0], is executed by a browser as a program. Because if that HTML file instead contained something like <select><option>Hello world!</option></select>, it would know to render some kind of list to choose from.

If I put that HTML inside of a <form> element, I could even get it to send the selections to a server of my choosing using the "action" attribute on said form (I may need to further instruct the browser to render a <button> or <input type="submit> inside the form or do some other fancy shenanigans). Put more useful options in the select and maybe some other input elements with some useful <label> elements and I might just have myself a graphical interface which people can use to submit information to me. But that's not right because it's just "present[ing] info", which just happens to be useful labels and inputs to in a form that will send the user-provided information to an external program; just a regular document, nothing special or "instructive" or "do[ing] things" about it. I hope I'm not laying it on too thick.

Seriously, though, if I didn't just describe a program that's executed by a browser then we have such fundamentally different ideas of what a "program" is that I might as well just concede that you're right, by whatever definition of the word you must be using.

[0] Every "Hello world!" program tutorial, which only instructs how to print that text to the screen before exiting, in every programming language ever is generally (and, IMO, reasonably) claimed to be a program, however rudimentary.

[throwaway290]

> it would know to render some kind of list to choose from.

but this is not executing a program. this interpreting markup to render some data in some format. HTML is the same programming language as XML or Markdown or JPG or MIDI or WAV... so, not really a programming language. it's input for a program written using some programming language

sometimes presenting data and programming are conflated, for example postscript, but this is not HTML

> Put more useful options in the select and maybe some other input elements with some useful <label> elements and I might just have myself a graphical interface which people can use to submit information to me. But

Handling form submissions, handling displaying select boxes etc, is all result of executing program that is browser itself. The input for that program is hypertext markup by webmaster.

(Running embedded JS however is executing a program by webmaster.)

I think trying to present markup as programming is very artificial and does not correspond to real world.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

> but this is not executing a program. this interpreting markup to render some data in some format.

Yes, it's interpreting markup to render some data in some format but that does not preclude such interpretation from being the execution of a program.

> sometimes presenting data and programming are conflated

My point is that executing a program is not mutually exclusive with presenting data. I am not conflating these terms but rather the opposite; I am pointing out that they are separate concepts which do not necessarily conflict with each other.

> Handling form submissions, handling displaying select boxes etc, is all result of executing program that is browser itself. The input for that program is hypertext markup

Right, that "hypertext markup" is a program for the browser (another program) to execute. That seems like an accurate use of English. If this is where we draw the line then JS must not be a programming language because it's just some kind of "script text" that is the input for some other real program.

> Running embedded JS however is executing a program by webmaster.

I understand this is your perspective but you haven't drawn a clear line separating this from the execution of an HTML program. Running plain HTML in a browser, consisting strictly of the necessary components of a valid HTML document, is also executing a program (webmaster isn't necessary).