[RESOLVED] PHP & HTML

[BigJohn]

Did I read someplace where you can have some PHP code in an HTML document?

If so, what are the limitations?

[benracer]

Yes its possible in a way as you can set the htaccess to do this.

RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html

[BigJohn]

I assume there are advantages and disadvantages to changing the htaccess as you suggest otherwise wouldn't most webmasters prefer this method over having both HTML and PHP pages on their websites?

I can certainly see some of the advantages, but what might the disadvantages be?

[benracer]

Personally from research on google i have found no disadvantages of using .php and i would name every page .php just incase you need to add some script later -unless you use the htaccess work around. Some other forum users stated that .php gets rated higher in search engines but others say it makes no difference :S

[BigJohn]

The big disadvantage for me is that I don't have PHP or MySql on my work computer. Therefore, whenever I do use PHP, I can't preview the file without uploading it to my 3rd party web server. Since I'm relatively new to PHP, I do a lot of "trial and error" runs to the server to see the results before going "live" with the file. If it were not for this, then I probably would rename all my pages to .php

[laserlight]

I can certainly see some of the advantages, but what might the disadvantages be?

Pages that contain no PHP code would be parsed for PHP code. A negligible disadvantage is the overall scheme of things.

Besides, URIs and file paths are not the same thing, so in the end you would map the actual file path, be it with a .html or .php file extension, to the actual URI, which does not even need a name suffix.

The big disadvantage for me is that I don't have PHP or MySql on my work computer.

Install a webserver, PHP and MySQL on your computer.

[NogDog]

On a side-note, 99% of the opinions out there on search engine optimization are junk or "snake oil" by those trying to sell SEO services at best, and sometimes so wrong as to actually hurt search rankings at worst (in my opinion, of course 😉 ). What you mainly need for good page rankings are (1) good content with valid and semantic HTML mark-up and (2) one-way links to those pages from external sites that are themselves well ranked.

Anything else is going to have only a negligible effect, and may even end up hurting ranking if it's some "trick" that web developers and the aforementioned "SEO snake oil merchants" have come up with to try to "trick" the search engines.

[benracer]

The advantage of using the htaccess is if you have a large site with .html you would not want to rename them all and update every single link

[bradgrafelman]

And the disadvantage of using the htaccess is if you have a large site with .html then you'd place a little extra load on the server as it now has to send every .html document through the PHP parser before it can be displayed.