[throwaway150]

> In this sense, while the html itself doesn't have control flow, it is an integral part of control flow in the larger system

That's correct but I don't see what it has got to do with the question of whether HTML is a programming language or not.

Strings do not have control flow but strings are integral part of larger programs that have control flow. So what? That doesn't make strings any closer to being programming languages.

[falcor84]

It's a question of semantics. What I'm saying is that the way many of us use html in practice in 2026 is less like arbitrary strings and more like db connection strings, where most of our focus is not on whether a bit of text is an article or an aside, but about how it participates in the control flow across different components in our architecture.

From another perspective, I'm not familiar with any present day company, where the html they use in their source code is sufficiently simple and distinct from the rest of the program to be managed by non-programmers. The only html that is just used as strings is that used for individual posts in a crm or marketing tool's cms, typically stored in a database rather than the source code repository.