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.

:-) :-) :-)