Re: Best Practice

Hi there, On Sunday, September 22, 2002 12:20 PM Subject: Re: [PHP] Best Practice Peter J. Schoenster wrote: <snip> > On 21 Sep 2002 at 12:51, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote: > > > > > I'm working on converting several static (price) pages on our site > > into dynamic pages, with the data stored in an MySQL database and > > PHP to pull the data out, with CSS to build the page and present it. > > I don't see how CSS would build anything, I guess it's just > terminology. > </snip> Actually, in a sense, CSS can "build" a page--esp. if "build" means how data are to be presented (formatted) by the browser. Remember, with CSS you can hide and unhide elements? For the original question... > > At the same time, I would also like to have a 'printer friendly' > > link on each page that visitors can click on and get the same page > > re-rendered for easy printing. What's the best way to get the data > > converted from one form to another? Should I be querying the > > database again to get the same data to reformat? Should I store the > > data in sessions and reformat based on the CSS? I would think > > having to query twice for the same thing would be a degradation in > > performance, right? So what's the best practice? > The best practice, IMHO, is the one implemented here: http://www.alistapart.com/ Try the page with your standard-compliant browser (like N7) and with a (crappy) browser like N4 and see the difference. You can "dissect" the site and find out how they did it. Or, you can read articles like this: http://www.alistapart.com/stories/netscape/ And one for "easy printing": http://www.alistapart.com/stories/goingtoprint/ - E