Is CSS or HTML a programming language?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. Markup languages are quite old; they were used for formatting in DOS-based word processors and typesetting software, but they became widely known when people began creating web pages.

If you remember, early web pages ended in .htm or .html, and any link with those extensions was an HTML page. It’s called hypertext markup language because you can create hyperlinks.

What is the web but a collection of hyperlinks?

A hyperlink is created like this:

<a href="https://www.DoMyProgrammingHomework.io">DoMyProgrammingHomework.io</a>

This piece of HTML creates the text “DoMyProgrammingHomework.io” linking to the DoMyProgrammingHomework.io website. A web page can contain many different HTML elements. This is the basic structure of an HTML page:

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Everything visible on a web page, whether text, images or video, goes inside the <body></body> tags. Extra information that helps other software, such as search engines like Google, understand your page (the title, the description and so on) goes inside the <head></head> tags.

How the information appears to visitors is also determined by formatting tags. For example, a paragraph uses the <p></p> tags, and a big heading uses the <h1></h1> tags.

Here is a small piece of HTML that appears as content to the visitor:

<h1>This is the main headline</h1>
<h2>This is a subheadline that can come under the main headline or anywhere on the page.</h2>
<p>This is a paragraph that contains general information. It may be an introductory paragraph, a paragraph in the middle of your web page, or a description.</p>

Most of the tags above have an opening tag and a closing tag. Each <p> ends with a </p>. This tells your browser that the content of that tag has ended and it’s time for the next one.

Not every HTML tag has a closing tag. The image tag, for example, doesn’t.

<img src="image-name.png" alt="Image description.">

That’s because there is nothing to put between opening and closing tags. You include the image file name as an attribute, and you can set the width and height with attributes too.

An attribute is extra information supplied to a tag. Tags tell your browser’s rendering engine how to render your page, and there are many more tags you can use to shape how it looks.

If you don’t style these tags, they use the browser’s default styles. What if you want your content to look exactly the way you want? You use Cascading Style Sheets.

CSS can be the backbone of your website layout, or at least your page layout. As the name suggests, it defines the style of your HTML tags. For a paragraph tag <p>, you can set the font, color, size, weight, whether it’s italic, the background color, and practically every other styling property you want, every time the tag is used.

Here is a small example:

<style>
h2 {
  font-family: "Times New Roman";
  font-size: 18pt;
  font-weight: bold;
  color: #124078;
  text-align: left;
}
p {
  font-family: "Arial";
  font-size: 14pt;
  color: #000000;
  text-align: left;
}
</style>

One of the biggest benefits of a stylesheet is that every use of these tags inherits the styles defined inside the <style></style> tags. What if you don’t use a stylesheet?

Every time you use a tag and want a consistent look, you’d have to repeat every property: the font name, size, color and so on. That bloats your source code and makes building each page far more work.

There is another benefit. Almost all layouts today are built with CSS. How your header appears, whether the main content sits left or right of the sidebar, and how the footer looks can all be controlled from a shared stylesheet file.

That way your styling applies across your whole website. You can completely change its look and feel with a few changes to the stylesheet.

What is a programming language?

To decide whether CSS or HTML is a programming language, you first need to understand what a programming language is. When it comes to websites, there are 2 types: server-side languages and client-side languages.

JavaScript is a client-side language. Client side means everything happens in your browser. If you right-click a web page and choose “View page source”, you can see the page’s source, including its CSS, HTML and JavaScript.

Whatever you see in the source runs on the client side. You are the client, so it’s all happening in your browser. A programming language lets you make a web page interactive.

For example, you can change the page’s content dynamically based on what the visitor does. A familiar example is checking whether someone has filled in your contact form correctly.

If someone tries to submit the form without an email address, you can instantly show an error telling them they need to enter one first.

JavaScript can do that. It can also store data in cookies on the user’s computer. When you add items to a shopping cart, they may be stored in a cookie or in your browser’s storage.

Clear that storage and the items may be gone. Similarly, if a page lets you drag items around, that’s JavaScript at work.

Dragging and dropping items into your cart happens with JavaScript. We’ll come back to JavaScript. A server-side language, on the other hand, isn’t visible when you view the source.

It runs on the server and works dynamically. Back to the shopping example: JavaScript can add items to your cart, but it can’t look up your past orders on its own.

For that, you need a program that can access the database, and only a server-side language should do that. If client-side JavaScript could access the database directly, it would be a security risk, because anyone can view a page’s JavaScript.

A programming language lets you control what happens on your page, dynamically, based on the current situation. For example, if you want to show different content to visitors from the US and the UK, you use a programming language.

A programming language lets you create decision logic: if this happens, do that; if that happens, do this. It also lets you repeat an action as many times as needed.

If you check your past orders, you may have several. Say you have 20 old orders to display. A loop runs and displays each item’s details until all 20 are shown.

Only a programming language can do that. If you use a content management system like WordPress or Joomla! with 1,100 web pages, those pages don’t physically exist as files on your server.

Their content is stored in a database. When a visitor requests a page, the program fetches that page or post ID, retrieves the content and displays it.

This dynamic behavior comes from a programming language like PHP, which runs on the server. JavaScript runs on the client and, as its name suggests, is also called a scripting language.

What is a scripting language?

As mentioned above, JavaScript is a scripting language. How is that different from a programming language? Partly it’s just naming, but one traditional distinction is that programming languages are compiled while scripting languages are interpreted.

In essence, all scripting languages are programming languages. In web development, scripting languages like JavaScript (and, historically, VBScript) run within the web page.

They can’t access sensitive server data, but they can dynamically arrange and rearrange the page’s content and validate data.

You could call them the junior siblings of programming languages. In the browser, JavaScript controls a big part of your application’s interface.

For example, in Google Docs, much of the interface runs on JavaScript, while the data is handled on the server by languages like Python, Java or C++.

Why CSS and HTML are not programming languages

As explained above, a programming language, whether JavaScript, PHP or C++, lets you manipulate a page’s content dynamically. Can CSS and HTML do the same? No.

CSS and HTML decide how your content appears on the page, but that is rendering. CSS can position elements on the page, but it doesn’t generate any data.

You can show and hide content with CSS, but CSS alone can’t decide on its own logic when to show or hide something. You need code for that.

Can HTML be generated dynamically? Can CSS? Sure, but you need a programming language to do it. A programming language can even write the page’s source code dynamically.

Since CSS and HTML don’t have loops, can’t make decisions and can’t generate content dynamically, they can’t be called programming languages, or scripting languages either.

How to mix CSS, HTML and a programming language

To build a dynamic, responsive website or even a single page, you need to combine CSS, HTML and a programming language like PHP or Java. What does combining them mean?

It means using them together to their full advantage. As we saw above, a programming language generates the page content dynamically using conditions and loops.

CSS and HTML decide how that content looks once it’s generated. Take WordPress again. When you load a page, its content is pulled dynamically from the MySQL database.

Once extracted, it is displayed according to your HTML and CSS. Languages used for web applications make it easy to mix code, CSS and HTML.

In PHP, you can use echo or print to output HTML on a page.

Here is an example:

<?php
print("<p>This is a line that will be printed on the web page through a PHP command.</p>");
?>

As you can see, the programming command can include HTML tags along with the text you want to display. What’s the benefit? Here is an example:

<?php
if ($country == "USA") {
  print("<p>Welcome from the USA!</p>");
} else if ($country == "Australia") {
  print("<p>Welcome from Australia!</p>");
}
?>

In the same way, you can generate CSS dynamically to change how elements on your page look based on a condition.

Combining CSS, HTML and a language like PHP or Java can be challenging, especially if you’re new to web development.

If you’re struggling to combine these technologies, our engineers can help with your do my programming homework request and explain the key concepts in writing.

What is HTML5 and what are its features?

HTML5 is the latest evolution of HTML. Many things that used to need add-ons are now built into HTML5. Semantically, it lets you describe what your content is. For example, an article goes inside <article></article> tags, a navigation section inside <nav></nav> tags, and so on.

Previously, embedding video or audio required a plug-in such as Flash. With HTML5-compatible browsers, you don’t need anything else to play video in your browser.

You just need the following code:

<video width="320" height="240" controls>
  <source src="my-video.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>

Can you become a web designer just by knowing CSS and HTML?

Compared with a decade ago, websites are much more interactive and dynamic. If you know advanced CSS, for example theming for WordPress or Joomla!, you can make a decent career as a web designer, but to be a serious candidate worth hiring, you should know some scripting.

There is a difference between a web designer and a web developer. A web designer designs websites, often with graphic tools. For example, you can use Photoshop to create layouts visually.

Many Adobe products can help you create great designs. A web developer builds web applications and is essentially a programmer. As a web developer, you are expected to know, besides JavaScript, a language like PHP, Java, Python, C++ or Perl.

You don’t need to know them all, but you should know some. You obviously need HTML and HTML5 to build web pages. Then comes CSS.

The most challenging part is building layouts. Older sites used tables, while modern layouts are built with CSS using flexbox and grid. This is where many web designers struggle, and if you master it, you will be in great demand.

Back to the original question: can you become a web designer with just CSS and HTML? It depends on your employer. If no programming is required, then yes, you can.

There is plenty of room to show your skills with just HTML and CSS. Building stylesheets for advanced layouts can be challenging and quite complex.

Even some programmers struggle to build clean, stylesheet-based layouts. Reputable web design companies expect you to write HTML and CSS by hand. Visual tools can help, but they don’t give you exact control over how your layout turns out.

And unless you understand how CSS and HTML work at the code level, you can’t do real web design. We recommend learning practical JavaScript.

Otherwise, you’ll always depend on a programmer for small things like validating a basic contact form. Have you recently joined a web design or development course for a promotion or a new job?

Working through your web design assignments makes you a better designer, but sometimes you don’t have enough time, and some people learn best by seeing a worked example right in front of them.

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