Core PHP Programming: Using PHP to Build Dynamic Web Sites

Using PHP to Output All HTML

Any of the examples in the previous section is an excellent first step toward introducing PHP into a Web site. Their impact in terms of server load is relatively low. I like to think of sites using similar approaches as being PHP-enabled, as if they had a small injection of PHP that makes them extraordinary. The step beyond this is what I think of as PHP-powered: a site made completely of PHP. In this approach every byte of output comes from PHP. The print (or echo or printf) function is used to send HTML tags. Every page is a script inside a single pair of PHP tags.

You might have noticed that most of the examples in the book take this approach. I have found that while this requires extra time up front, the code ...