@Jake – Very true, and thanks for adding that further clarification on the differentiation from server side and client side programming. I might have been a bit too broad in lumping all programming languages together. My goal with this post was to really stay from the perspective of someone on the outside who doesn’t really know what getting a ‘programmer’ means.

In contrast, HTML is formally a description language which describes how text is to be formatted.

The line blurs at some point as new standards incorporate some forms of programmatic execution into description languages. Traditionally, however, languages such as PHP, Ruby, perl, C#, etc are all used to construct HTML which is then interpreted client-side by the browser.

The line is blurred primarily on the server side where a PHP page is loaded by the server, executed by a PHP interpreter, and used to render HTML which is then sent to the client (browser). The browser, however, never sees PHP. It only sees HTML.