Re: Question on HTML "state" and ability to interact with server

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003 06:46:58 -0400, you wrote: > I am assuming this is something only featured in Internet Explorer, but I >was wondering if there were something I could look at to do something >similar in PHP? The only things I could think of always led me to the same >conclusion, the HTML page won't render until all of the code has been run, >server side, and any updates of content would result in the entire page, and >therefore its state, being re-rendered in the browser. I'm fairly sure that what you're seeing is client-side behaviour. ASP.NET divides the world into "uplevel" (IE 5.5 and above) and "downlevel" (everything else) browsers. A component should spit out fancy DHTML for an uplevel browser, and plain HTML for a downleve browser. Try looking at your page with Netscape or Opera (returning the correct user-agent strings), and see if you see the same behaviour. Compare the uplevel- and downlevel-generated scripts, and you'll probably see some extra Javascript? > Can someone tell me of some good resources discussing this behavior, and >whether it is or might one day be supported by PHP? Back in my HTML-only, >pre-PHP days, I made non-Explorer browsers load content dynamically using >DHTML by sending the contents of a URL to a layer after I entered text and >clicked a button, so hypothetically PHP might fit in that scheme. If anyone >can point me in the right direction, I would be greatly appreciative.... I doubt PHP will ever "support" this, because it's basically Javascript, therefore client-side. You could cut the code out of the ASP.NET-generated page and into a PHP script, and it would work. ASP.NET works at a different level of abstraction (simulating an event-driven/OO model over HTTP), so you can consider ASP.NET components as single entities, even though they are composed of HTML, Javascript, servser-side code, etc. PHP or ASP, which work at a lower level of abstraction, see client-side and server-side code as very seperate things.