In this section I'll use a very bad HTML: in particular, I'll avoid using Cascading Style Sheets in order to reduce the number of files and keep this tutorial as simple as possible. You should refer to other documentation for a guide to writing good HTML.
I'll also often create fragments of HTML files like this:
<h1>Title</h1> <p>Content</p>
This is not a complete HTML file, since it misses at least the Document Type Definition, head and body sections. Of course, whenever you decide to use G-Cows or not, you'll have to use standard HTML syntax for your sites.
Cows is the interpreter for the G-Cows scripting language. It parses a text file and looks for <cows> tags. Everything outside these tags is sent verbatim to output while everything inside is considered a script and executed; script's output is sent to output too.
File hello.cws
<h1>Running Cows</h1>
<p>
<cows echo ("Hello World from Cows"); />
</p>
This is a very simple input file. We want Cows to parse it and execute the script; the usual way to invoke Cows is:
cows input-file output-file
$ cows hello.cws hello.html $ cat hello.html <h1>Running Cows</h1> <p> Hello World from Cows </p>
As you can see, Cows created a file consisting in a verbatim copy of hello.cws with the script replaced by its output. Of course this is a trivial example: you'll never use Cows for such a simple task.
Another simple example:
File hello2.cws
<cows message="Hello World from G-Cows"; /> <h1>Running Cows</h1> <p> <cows echo (message); /> </p>
There are two scripts now, let's run Cows and see what happens:
$ cows hello2.cws hello2.html $ cat hello2.html <h1>Running Cows</h1> <p> Hello World from G-Cows </p>
As you can see, you can have more than one script in the same file and Cows will parse
them as if they were a whole. As a consequence of this, the variable message defined within the first script is accessible from the
second one.
This manual can be downloaded from http://www.g-cows.org/.