Preparing pages

We have discussed how to launch the server and dispatch users' requests. Now it is time for the frontend issue, namely, the web page. Web pages are what users see and interact with. There are numerous technologies that can be used for building excellent web pages, such as PHP, Perl, and Python. But the basic way is using HTML and CSS.

XHTML

In Opa, both HTML and CSS are first class citizens, and are understood and checked by the compiler without you having to wrap them as strings. Having XHTML as a native type implies near-perfect XSS (cross-site scripting) protection. It also means we can easily compose elements, that is, we can write <div>{foo()}</div>. HTML values have a predefined xhtml type, and there is a built-in syntax for constructing XHTML values. Here is an overview of the syntax for XHTML:

// XHTML is a data-type with built-in syntax
xhtml span = <span class="test">Hello Opa!</span>
//named closing tag is optional,
// so are the quotes around...