From jwbensley@gmail.com Thu Feb  4 22:06:09 2010
From: James Bensley <jwbensley@gmail.com>
To: main@lists.alug.org.uk
Subject:
 Re: [ALUG] HTML embedded scripting,	is it really this much of a 	kludge?
Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:58:41 +0000
Message-ID: <3c857e1c1002041358o37caeef9sf86142913f007236@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <a59829111002041336w244cd0bftc10527f6261fd598@mail.gmail.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============7173329826323735179=="

--===============7173329826323735179==
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Note before: I have no idea what level of knowledge you have with this
stuff some I'm start from the top, sorry if I seem undermining.

OK, first the <script> tag.
This tag lets you declare a sub section of your HTML code in which you
can use another language. HTML is rather static on its own and so
other languages like JavaScript give you the ability to insert some
more dynamic and interactive code.

Another language you could use in the <script> tag is VBScript (Visual
Basic Script) however this is limited to Windows clients as Visual
Basic is a Microsoft language for scripting elements of the Windows
environment which can be inserted into a HTML page or HTA (HTML
Application). A slightly inaccurate parody would be if you could
insert bash script into you bash for the clients browser to interpret
along side the HTML. Visual Basic Script, VBScript or VBS is a
variation on a full blown high level application language called
Visual Basic which is a for writing high level applications within
Windows (again another slightly inaccurate parody would be to imagine
if you could insert 'PythonScript' directly into your HTML pages
giving you a less powerful version of python to work with.

On the to PHP stuff. PHP is a server side language. What does this
mean? It means than you can write a HTML page in your favourite text
editor and then open it in your favourite browser and it will
interpret the result and display a page. You could even throw some
JavaScript in there (don't confuse JavaScript with Java!). This can
all be done on your desktop.

PHP is a server side language which means you need a web service (like
Apache) running serving up your pages like a web server with the PHP
extensions/interpreter installed. What this means is that you can
write a page in HTML and throw some PHP in. Then when a client browses
to mywebserver.com/my_php_page.php on the server, instead of simply
parsing the client browser the code of the page to render the server
sees that the file has a .php extension and reads and executes the PHP
code sending the resulting HTML code of that PHP code execution to the
clients browser.

HTH and didn't confuse you more!

-- 
Regards,
James ;)

Ted Turner  - "Sports is like a war without the killing." -
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/ted_turner.html


--===============7173329826323735179==--