Head First PHP & MySQL

Chapter 1. Add Life to your Static Pages: It’s Alive

You’ve been creating great web pages with HTML, and a sprinkling of CSS. But you’ve noticed that visitors to your site can’t do much other than passively look at the content on the pages. The communication’s one-way, and you’d like to change that. In fact, you’d really like to know what your audience is thinking. But you need to be able to allow users to enter information into a web form so that you can find out what’s on their minds. And you need to be able to process the information and have it delivered to you. It sounds as if you’re going to need more than HTML to take your site to the next level.

HTML is static and boring

HTML’s great for creating web pages, that much we already know. But what about when you need web pages that actually do something? Suppose you need to search a database or send an email... what then? HTML falls short because it’s a pretty lifeless language, designed for displaying information that never changes.

With pure HTML web pages, the server simply serves up static HTML that can only display content.

The web server’s a big part of the problem with lifeless HTML since it serves as nothing more than a boring delivery mechanism. A browser requests a page, the server responds with HTML, end of story. To turn ...