;;; sec1.01.mhtml: -*- Meta-HTML -*- 

;;;  Copyright (c) 1996 Universal Access Inc.
;;;  Author: Henry Minsky (hqm@ua.com) Sun Sep 15 11:03:56 1996.
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  <h2>Introduction to HTML</h2>
  
  HTML is the HyperText Markup Language. As its name suggests, it is a
  is a markup language, not a programming language. This means that its
  purpose is to mark plain text. Browsers read the text and markup
  <i>tags</i>, and format it based upon the information found in those
  tags.  The simplest example of an html file is one containing only
  text, with no tags:
  
  <example-table>
  Hello, world!
  </example-table>
  
  When a browser encounters a string of unformatted text like this,
  it displays it like so:
  
  Hello, world!
  
  Now this looks pretty bare. We can spice it up using other
  html tags. For example, suppose we wanted to emphasize a part of
  the text. HTML provides various tags which might be used for
  this. Let's try one, the <verbatim quote><em></em></verbatim quote>
  tag pair:
  
  <example-table>
  Hello, <em>world</em>!
  </example-table>
  
  Which produces on a page something like this:
  
  Hello, <em>world</em>!
  
  Notice how the tags in the <verbatim quote><brackets></verbatim quote>
  are not displayed, but instead they affect the formatting of the text
  enclosed between them.
  
  Suppose we wanted to shout. Well, there are tags for that as
  well: 
  
  <example-table>
  <strong>Hello, <em>world</em>!</strong>
  </example-table>
  
  Gives us something like:
  
  <strong>Hello, <em>world</em>!</strong>
  
  Most html tags consist of two parts, an opening tag consisting of 
  a directive in <verbatim quote><angle-brackets></verbatim quote>
  and a closing tag which looks just like the opening tag, except
  the first character is a slash: <verbatim qupte></tag></verbatim quote>
  
  This is, surprisingly, pretty much all you have to know about html.
  Of course, there are dozens of tags and millions of ways to combine
  them, so you should probably practice a bit. You'll find a number of
  good html references on the net, references which go into much greater
  detail than we can do here Have a look at a few of them, and put
  together a few pages.
  
  There are several good online introductions to HTML:
  <ul>
    <li>
    <a href="http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html">
    NCSA's HTML Primer</a>
    <li>
    <a href="http://www.cwru.edu/help/introHTML/toc.html">
    An introduction to HTML from Case Western Reserve University</a>
  </ul>
  
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