Those pop-up thingies

Is there a way to pop-up one of those mini-browsers with a message in them from PHP? I don't know the proper terminology. I'm doing input validation in PHP and would like to prompt the user as to why their input was rejected, rather than just saying "Invalid" and re-posting the form. There's not room to put that on the form itself. Related: I suppose the following is impossible without a client-side script, but I'll ask just in case: Is it possible to do a server push in PHP, to update a counter at a specific spot without re-drawing the entire page, and without using Javascript? Is there a term for this that I can look in the archives for? ************************************************* Ron Newman Troubadour Technology http://www.imt.net/~ronman/ *************************************************