On Fri, 2025-03-21 at 10:05 -0400, bruce wrote:
Server Side Scripting.. on my todo to research further.. I seem to recall the basic tech was to have "stuff" inserted in the html for execution on/by the server process.. Am I off base in recalling.
At the same time, what does the implementation of SSI/HTML do that can't be easily handled by a php/html combination.
SSI allows something to be generated externally (by the server, rather than in your browser) and the results inserted into the page.
Apache has a number of built-in features, such as letting you insert a filedate (e.g. this page was last updated on...), and it can insert the results from external code (and as far as I'm aware, it's whatever languages you can run on the computer).
PHP is similar in concept, perhaps with an advantage that what you learn to code in PHP on one computer system should be directly workable on another computer system (with a compatible version of PHP).
I could code a BASH script on Linux to do a function, or compile a Linux executable, etc. But if I then had to move onto a Windows host, I'd probably have to write new code.
The disadvantages of various languages for web pages is that people often don't write their own code, but grab things other people wrote, and often don't vet their suitability or security. That applies whether its PHP, Perl, JavaScript, or anything else.