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Discussion on: Are CSS and HTML programming languages?

 
alvaromontoro profile image
Alvaro Montoro • Edited

That's a good point. A FSM/automaton could be built using only HTML with links and IDs/anchors... Again, it wouldn't be practical or pretty, but it could be done. But then someone will claim that it is really a simulation, or that they don't like it.

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johncip profile image
jmc • Edited

I help out with an after-school program where, early in the curriculum, we teach the students to make HTML "choose your own adventure" games. (I made this one). It's useful for that, at least :P

(We use separate pages rather than links to fragments on the same page.)

And they are roughly like FSMs, though I think of FSMs as having an input vocabulary that's separate from the states. For instance, with a dial-type combination lock, you can pick any number on any step. With a tree of links, you can think of each page's links as representing a 0, a 1, etc., but it's not "the same" 0 leading out of each page. (You can link to the same destination from multiple places, but that's just going to the same state.) Hopefully I'm making sense. Maybe that lack of a separate input vocabulary just means they're more like Mealy machines than Moore machines? I'm not sure.

They also feel like decision trees to me, FWIW. It could be that there's some formal correspondence between the two concepts, but it's sadly not my area :P

You may be interested in the HTML/CSS game The Mine -- the top code comment makes it sound like it might just be a big FSM made out of checkboxes. I haven't tried to confirm that though.

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alvaromontoro profile image
Alvaro Montoro

That’s what I was referring: each page is a state, each link is a transition, and the input is the user clicking on a link. And that can be achieved with HTML even without CSS. (Although CSS will make it prettier 😊)