$HTML Programming Language

Introduction from the manual

1. Preface

In January 1996, Mondo Inc. began to develop web-sites where database access and output based on user input where necessary features. At this time, the web server operating system was Unix for several reasons. Microsoft had not yet developed their web-server IIS yet and OS/2 was only in the initial phase. Netscape had introduced server-includes, SHTML-files, where it was possible to include special tags that were substituted with server values before the HTML output was forwarded to the Internet client browser.

At this point in 1996, web programming had to be either Perl or GCI-scripts written in C/C++.

Perl was, and still is insecure and C/C++ is hard to use even though the developed applications can be really fast performing server scripts.

The need for middle-ware CGI-scripting tools was evident. Mondo wanted a toolkit to facilitate the development fast performing CGI-scripts and to develop web-server applications easy and fast. During the following year, Anders Hyldahl, Mondo Inc. invented and developed the server based dynamic HTML-language named $HTML. The language was designed such that HTML-programmers could easily integrate $HTML-statements with HTML - simple and straight. $HTML in an extension to normal HTML designed to produce HTML output. The $HTML language is designed specially for Internet web applications, unlike well known languages like Java, Perl or Basic who has been stretched to cover web applications.

The $HTML script language uses the HTTP transport protocol to control traffic between client browser and server, determining how variables and their values are given from one session to another. The HTML extended character set specifying how string should be manipulated, cookies, server-requests, HTTP-redirections, are all natural part of the language. Since the language is specially designed for web applications, it has no meaning as traditional computer language.

The language was further developed and refined during usage and has today been used to build a long list of complex, sophisticated and high performing web-sites. The $HTML server script language is currently being developed to support increased functionality to meet the HTML developers demand

This documentation is aimed at the HTML editor who wishes to learn $HTML, no programming skills are required. This work has been edited by Thorkild Stoltze Laursen during December 1997 at Mondo Inc.

Thorkild Stoltze Laursen, Mondo, Dec. 1997

Dollar HTML Language Specification Cover

Dollar HTML Assignment and Control Structures

Dollar HTML Assignment and Control Structures 2

Code example:

<html>
<head>
<title>$$-HTML examp101.msk</title>
</head>
<body>
$SET(Message, "World")$
Hello $Message$!
</body>
</html>

$-HTML