BTW ... PHP was a great thing for ISP's, since they can give people scripting capability without the risks of giving them shell/cgi-bin/perl access. PHP runs inside the web space, and can run from the users space. This is it's major benefit in the general web community. How far it will go depends on a lot of other factors. If you look at the development of perl, it's hard to believe PHP will develop into as robust a product, and it will probably have to lean on perl and c modules for much of the work. This is not a "bad" thing, in and of it'self. PHP was designed to do a job, and it does that. Some people want to make this a religious war like NT/Unix (heck, that's easy, one is a false god the other is real <G>) but with computer languages it's more of a matter of personal preference, and using the right language or tool for the job.
At one point I was working in about 7 different languages at one time. Each did something better/different for the purposes it was being used for. Yes, it was rough, especially back then. Now, things have settled down a bit.
I never liked SSI either. Many sites used it and still do. I think it incurs too much of a server-side penalty in performance. In some ways, PHP can, and probably will, replace that for "dynamic" pages.
But, I don't like dHTML or CCS either... partly for the same reasons.
It looks cool, it has a place, but 90% of the web can be done without it, and if that 90% didn't use it, the web would be a better place for it :)
If you try to run an interactive site (and I don't mean games, or flash, I do mean where a user searches, and selects then gets something for the effort) you'll find trying to keep up with the differences in browsers daunting enough. Throw this other stuff in, and well... it becomes more bother than it's worth.
I still believe CONTENT is king, and it always will be. If you offer something of value, you'll do well. If you just look good, you'll soon become a foot note.
I look at the phpMyAdmin program -- which was the one PHP program I did use regularly. Until MySQLMan in it's current release. With the current release, the _only_ time I load phpMyAdmin is because it has a simple one-push reload the server access (I keep forgetting to ask Alex about adding that feature). When I went through all the forum software, I went with wwwThreads because it seemed the most stable of all the products at the time.
But, it's almost a year later, my 1 year license for updates is almost up, and I'm not 100% satisfied with the program. In the past few months there have been 2 new GPL efforts on Perl bsed forums, neither of which is supportign MySQL (big mistake) and several new PHP based ones (plus the few PHP ones that have continued to develop). Maybe I'll look at them all again, since the forum software -- which is 90% display work -- is perfect for PHP.
Anyway... it's not a one or the other type deal. It's really picking the right tool for the job. Sometimes, you don't need a flat head screwdriver but a phillips. And then, sometimes neither of those works, so you pick a different option and use a hex-nut on the outside of the screw. Right tool, right job.
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