Xicroz Xadanz Technology Website

Why Would I Want to Do That?

2009-10-02T02:09:00.000-07:00

Because the whole idea behind a web server is to serve up HTML web pages to browsers. PHP doesn't change that fact. What PHP allows you to do is change the HTML content on the fly with things like today's date, date pulled from a database, or even calculated values such as the order total in a shopping cart. So PHP allows you to manipulate the HTML that goes into web pages as apposed to them just being created statically at design time. It's very common to have HTML code for a page with PHP code sprinkled throughout to plug in important data or otherwise alter the HTML programmatically.

Is It Really OK to Put Both PHP And HTML Code in the Same File?

2009-10-02T02:07:00.000-07:00

Absolutely in fact in many cases it's absolutely necessary to do so.

So Even If It's a Bad Coding Convention I can Mix And Match The Case of PHP Code?

2009-10-02T02:01:00.000-07:00

No, not entirely. The huge exception to the case insensitivity of PHP is variable names which apply to data storage locations that you create. So let's take the $email variable used in the report and abduction script as an example. This variable name is can-sensitive so you can't refer to it as $EMAIL or $eMail. All variable names in PHP are case-sensitive like this so it's important to name variables carefully and then reference them consistently in your code.

Does It Matter Whether I Put PHP Commands in Uppercase or Lovercase?

2009-10-02T01:52:00.001-07:00

Yes and No. For the most part PHP isn't case-sensitive so you can get away with mixing the case of most commands. That means you can use echo or ECHO or EchO when echoing content. However as a matter of convention it's a very good idea to be consistent with case in your scripts. Most PHP coders prefer lowercase for the vast majority of PHP code which is why you 'll see echo used throughout the example code in the book.

But Don't All Web Pages Orginate on The Server Even Pure HTML Pages in .html Files?

2009-10-02T00:52:00.000-07:00

Yes, All of the files for a website are stored on the server as ... .html, .css, .php, etc but they aren't all processed by the server. HTML and CSS files, as well as images files, are sent directly to the client browser without worrying about what's actually inside them. PHP files are different because they contain code that's processed and run on the web server. It's not the PHP code that's sent to the browser, it's the results of running the PHP code that are sent, and these results are pure HTML and CSS.

Even Through My Web Browser Shows That a Web Page Has a Name that in Extension .php It's Still Pure HTML? How is That?

2009-10-02T00:47:00.000-07:00

It's possible because the page originates as PHP code on the server but is transformed into HTML code before making its way to the browser. So the server runs the PHP code and converts it into HTML code before sending it along to the browser for viewing. This means that even though a .php extension file contains PHP code, the browser never sees it ... it only sees the HTML code that results from running the PHP code on the server.

What Does PHP Stand For?

2009-10-02T00:44:00.000-07:00

PHP is an acronym that originally stood for Personal Home Pages. Somewhere along the way the acronym was changed to mean PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. The latter is considered a recursive acronym beacause it references itself ... the acronym (PHP) is inside the acronym. Cleaver ? Confusing? You decide!!