;;; sec1.02.mhtml: -*- Meta-HTML -*- 

;;;  Copyright (c) 1996 Universal Access Inc.
;;;  Author: Henry Minsky (hqm@ua.com) Sun Sep 15 11:04:11 1996.
<set-var title="Introduction to HTML">
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  <h2>Introduction to Meta-HTML</h2>
  <h3>The Basics</h3>
  
  At this point your are expected to have some familiarity with
  HTML. If not, you should have a look at the 
  <a href="sec1.01.mhtml">HTML Primer</a>
  before proceeding.
  
  As we saw in the introduction to HTML, the simplest HTML
  file consists of plain text with no HTML tags. So, for example, 
  to have the phrase "Hello, world!" display on a user's browser,
  you could write a file containing simply:
  
  <example-table>
  Hello, world!
  </example-table>
  
  And as we saw before, a slightly more complicated version,
  taking advantage of some HTML formatting tags, might
  look like this:
  
  <example-table>
  <strong>Hello, <em>world!</em></strong>
  </example-table>
  
  Which produces:
  
  <strong>Hello, <em>world!</em></strong>
  
  Now that's easy, but what if you wanted to repeat <em>Hello,
  world!</em> a few times? Repeating things is one of the basic
  features of programming languages. But html is not a programming
  language. To print <em>Hello, world!</em> five times, you would
  have to write something like this:
  
  <example-table>
  <strong>Hello, <em>world!</em></strong><br>
  <strong>Hello, <em>world!</em></strong><br>
  <strong>Hello, <em>world!</em></strong><br>
  <strong>Hello, <em>world!</em></strong><br>
  <strong>Hello, <em>world!</em></strong><br>
  </example-table>
  
  Which appears on a browser as:
  
  <strong>Hello, <em>world!</em></strong><br>
  <strong>Hello, <em>world!</em></strong><br>
  <strong>Hello, <em>world!</em></strong><br>
  <strong>Hello, <em>world!</em></strong><br>
  <strong>Hello, <em>world!</em></strong><br>
  
  Is there an easier way?  Well, for this particularly simple 
  example probably not, but there is a <em>better</em> way.
  <Meta-HTML> <em>is</em> a programming language, and provides
  a general mechanism for repetition.
  
  For this simple example, we'll need to use two basic <Meta-HTML>
  features: 
  <ul>
    <li><a href="sec2.00.mhtml">assigning variables</a>, and 
    <li><a href="sec3.00.mhtml">flow control</a>
  </ul>
  
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