memes

Well, you can't make Tetris in HTML without including some other language that has loops and variables.

I'm also not sure if you can do it in Excel without using VBA, which is a programming language. Excel doesn't do circular logic in the document sheets.

Anyway the issue or joke is the lack of definition of "programming".

HTML is a text encoding system. It's not that different form something like the Morse code. It's only instructions for how to decipher a series of codes. It takes input and presents it as an output, starting from the beginning and working its way to the end.

In my very unofficial opinion, a "program" is something that is able to "run" by itself, so that the code itself has instructions for which part of the code to run.

If you decipher a morse code, it doesn't suddenly have instructions that force you to go backwards in the code and decipher from there or to jump to different sections. The text output might tell you to do so, but if you follow the text, then you're doing something else than deciphering morse code.

HTML works the same. It start from the top and interprets its way down. It can have some conditional statements, but nothing that will make it go backwards and rerun the same instructions again.

The interpretation is of course more advanced than Morse code and it can call other languages to do stuff, so HTML is basically a document describing a job procedure in that way. The individual jobs can be reoccurring tasks, but the document itself isn't.

So in my opinion it's not "running" anything. It's just a document being printed on screen.

I'll admit that "one-shot" programs are a thing, and documents with variables do exist, so it's not clear cut. A programming language should be capable of those things though, and HTML isn't one on its own.