Alternatives to HTML for website creation?

Question

It seems the most common aproach to web design is to use HTML/XHTML & CSS in conjunction with other technologies or languages like Javascript or PHP.

On a theoretical level, I'm interested to know what other languages or technologies could be used to build an entire site without using a single HTML tag or CSS style for styling/positioning?

Could a website be made only using XML or PHP alone, including actual styling and positioning?

Presumably Flash sites are till embedded in HTML tags?

Thanks

Answer 1

There are actually several solutions that allow you to nearly completely avoid CSS and HTML.

GWT: Google Web Toolkit

Written in Java and will allow you to build both server and client code in Java. Used to build Google Wave.

Cappuccino and Objective-J:

Objective-J is to JavaScript as Objective-C is to C. It extends JavaScript with many near features, including type-checking, classes and types. Cappuccino is like Cacoa (Mac OS X GUI toolkit). Using these two you can build incredibly rich and desktop like webapps. They run mostly on the client side and you can use whatever you want on the server. A good example is 280slides

SproutCore is similar to Cappuccino, but it uses pure JavaScript instead. Apple is using SproutCore to make me.com.

I should also mention that knowledge to HTML, CSS, JavaScript is a good skill to know, just like understanding your compiler is a good skill.

EDIT: As said above Adobe Flash can also be used.

Answer 2

You can make a website with out a single html tag. Just give folder read access to all your directories, have sensible file names. From here you user will be able to browse images , read text files, download videos and depending on the content he may or may not come back ever again, but you do achieve the goal of setting up a "website" with out a single line of html or css or any other code for that matter.

:-) :-) :-)

Answer 3

You can host a telnet server with anonymous access and a specialized shell that restricts the user to doing whatever it is you want the site to do. ;)

Answer 4

Lets make the distinction between what is required by the web browser, and what you as a developer use to create that markup.

Remember that HTML nowadays is xml. You could use any markup language you like and convert that to HTML using XML.

eg ASP.NET uses markup such as which is converted on the server to .

As long as the content going down the wire to the browser is HTML, or generates HTML through script, you can use any approach you like.

However these approaches have mostly failed as developers prefer having direct control over the markup. It makes css as well as scripting much easier when you are certain what the html is going to be.

ASP.NET MVC is a product created in response to criticisms leveled at the ASP.NET webforms model.

Answer 5

Also, this is another answer because it's a completely different technology, but you can write an application in XUL and it'll run in Mozilla-based browsers without any HTML.

Answer 6

There's also XML. You can create websites with XML only. A well known one is World Of Warcraft. Check the page source. An XSL is used as stylesheet. There exist even XML based web frameworks like OpenLaszlo. You can let it serve either DHTML or Flash on reqeust out of a single XML template.

Answer 7

The Wt C++ Web Toolkit.

You can write your web application in C++ using Qt-style widgets (input boxes, buttons, tabs etc) and hook up client-side events to C++ code on your server. All without writing any HTML or CSS.

A sample application from their website (you may also want to look at this excellent tutorial):

HelloApplication::HelloApplication(const WEnvironment& env)
  : WApplication(env)
{
  setTitle("Hello world");                               // application title

  root()->addWidget(new WText("Your name, please ? "));  // show some text
  nameEdit_ = new WLineEdit(root());                     // allow text input
  nameEdit_->setFocus();                                 // give focus

  WPushButton *b = new WPushButton("Greet me.", root()); // create a button
  b->setMargin(5, Left);                                 // add 5 pixels margin

  root()->addWidget(new WBreak());                       // insert a line break

  greeting_ = new WText(root());                         // empty text

  /* when the button is clicked, call the 'greet' method */
  b->clicked().connect(this, &HelloApplication::greet);
}

void HelloApplication::greet()
{
  /* set the empty text object greeting_ to greet the name entered */
  greeting_->setText("Hello there, " + nameEdit_->text());
}

Answer 8

Curl (requires a browser plugin)

Wikipedia article

A webpage looks like this:

{curl 1.7 applet}
{value
    let b:int=99
    let song:VBox={VBox}
    {while b > 0 do
        {song.add b & " bottle(s) of beer on the wall,"}
        {song.add b & " bottle(s) of beer."}
        {song.add "Take one down, pass it around,"}
        set b = b - 1
        {song.add b & " bottle(s) of beer on the wall."}
    }
    song
}

Source

Answer 9

Since browsers view HTML, I'm assuming you mean create a site without ever having to edit/write HTML/CSS. The framework/app environment/whatever taking care of everything for you - yet still allowing you control over the presentation layer.

Seems like that is certainly possible on a theoretical level.

I ran across Noloh (not one line of html) a while back. Was intrigued, but never actually tried it out.

From various places on the Noloh site:

Because NOLOH does not rely on HTML or pages, maintaining complex rich Internet applications is significantly easier than with other methods.

Developing applications with NOLOH only requires using a single, unified language: a superset of PHP that completely maintains all aspects of server-client communication for you!

Answer 10

I think you could build a site entirely in SVG.

The front page of emacsformacosx is almost entirely SVG, for example.

Downsides: It wouldn't be viewable in IE (at least through version 8). And last I looked, text support, like flowing and justification, was weaker in SVG. (You could embed HTML inside an SVG element when you needed sophisticated text features, but that would violate your no-HTML rule.)

You'd probably still want to use CSS with SVG, because it's a good idea there for the same reason it's a good idea with HTML, but it wouldn't be necessary.

Answer 11

A website is always viewed through a browser (at least always if you are human :)). Browsers understand HTML. Whatever the technology - you have to basically render HTML. Even in cases with rich technologies like flash, the flash object that is rendered by a browser plugin is embedded inside the HTML.

In theory it is possible to do it without HTML, but the question becomes how much does the product diverge from the definition of a website...

Answer 12

One really short, simple answer... you can't :D

Flash requires an embed tag, an image requires an embed tag etc, so you'd have to use HTML in some method or another.

PHP is an embedded language, it is used to generate HTML on which the browsers renders, with XML, well technically a browser like Ie or FireFox will render it in it's own way for readability, but I would not class that as a website.

The major developments in the world of web technologies involves the development of HTML and CSS to improve them, there isn't any need for an alternative. In fact we're pushing towards a standard, what point would there be in introducing a new language to negate these standards. The whole IE saga would simply get worse.

Like the others have suggested, you could directly load an image or a flash file, but an image is useless on it's own, and a flash interface throws up loads of problems like SEO, accessibility etc, not least it's very heavy and usually completely misused. In my mind I wouldn't even class this method as a website, it just doesn't tick any of the boxes (IMO).

Answer 13

I think you can have an URL pointing directly at a hosted Flash (SWF) file, I've certainly done this though I don't know if all browsers work. Anyhow, I tested this when developing MyDinos.

e.g: http://mydinos.com/home.swf

Answer 14

You can use Emscripten and its SDL subset.