Hi Guys, this is just a simple explanation of why you can’t see php if you list the page source. Okay, let’s start at the beginning. PHP used to stand for Personal Home Page tools. It is a HyperText Preprocessor language and was developed by a guy called, Rasmus Lerdorf in the early days of php’s developement. Now when php has developed into a full-blown language, the name was changed to be more in line with its expanded functionality.
There are many computer languages out there from simple ‘Basic’, (‘B'eginers 'A'llpurpose ’S'imbolic 'I'nterchange.) through 'COBOL’, COmmon Business-Oriented Language. ‘C’, ‘Perl’, ‘Lisp’, A+, APL, Chapel, Fortran, J, Julia, K, Matlab, Octave, PILOT, TUTOR and so-on and so-on. You can see a list of the languages HERE COBOL is one of the oldest computer languages, (I hated learning COBOL at college when I did a BTech Nat Dip, you had to do everything more or less three times. Stupid!) But it was written by an American Woman and she was called Grace Hooper, as well as others.
Anyway I digress - Back to PHP.– PHP is a very popular and general-purpose scripting language which is especially suited to web development. It is fast to put together, it’s very flexible and dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations., (Oh and for you non English speakers out there the ‘pragmatic definition’ is; dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations. :)
PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites on the internet. In fact you are on a website right now that uses PHP extensively. Okay so what distinguishes PHP from something like client-side JavaScript is that the code is executed on the server, (server-side scripting) generating the HTML which is then sent to you the client, the client being your browser. This is why you cannot see any PHP text on this website’s source code and why it is so useful to programmers and webmaster alike. Here is a small sample of php:
Notice that it is combined in this instance within some html code.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Hack This Website</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
echo "Hello I am on the server of this website and I'm a PHP script!";
?>
</body>
</html>
You can see where the php starts within the html code: <?php and the the echo command which outputs the words “Hello I am on the server of this website and I’m a PHP script!” to your browser. The ?> is the end of the php and we return to the html code and the tags that end the html;
