running PHP with .html extension

Anon

Is it possible to run PHP in files with a .html extension rather than .php and if so how?

I suppose this would be the equivalant of making SSI run in .html files by adding:

AddHandler server-parsed .html

to your .htaccess file on Apache.

TIA

Anon

Something like that. See :

http://phpbuilder.com/tips/item.php?id=79

Anon

Apparently this would seriously slow down your site since everything would be parsed by php and not just bits and pieces.

rgds,
scott d`

Anon

not true!

it only tells php that "ahh, there is php code in .html files to parse, just like there is in .php and .php3 and whatever else they are telling me ... okay, i will parse then"

Anon

Yeah but if you use .htaccess to limit it to certain directories, I don't think it going to make that big of a difference

Anon

True....but surely any other files that would normally just be regular html and completely skipped by php will now be run via php.exe to search through the page for the <?php ?> tags.....thus slowing down the server?

rgds,
scott d~

Anon

oops. yes for sure! i misread your words, sorry! /me eyes bed. we agree on this issue!

Anon

Besides, entire sites are now being coded in php. While it would somewhat slow down your HTML only files, "you get the how'd they do it?" coolness of serving the .html and getting the content listed by the search engines, who sometimes skip over .php files.

Only drawback: confusions caused by which files have php code in them and which dont.

Anon

I've seen discussions on this before and from what I've read, there really isn't much of a slow down for parsing .html files as php. If there is no php code in the file, then it's going to be passed to the browser very quickly. It'd be like parsing a file full of comments, with no code. See what I mean?

Also, this is in reference to the last comment of confusing file with and without php code. A good idea is to have .htm files be regualar html, and .html files be parsed by php. It still makes your site look like it's all plain html, and gives you a way to keep them seperate..

My $0.02

---John Holmes...

Anon

In the tests that I've run, the difference between serving up a raw HTML file and parsing the file for the possibility of PHP tags is roughly 100%.

That sounds like a lot, but it's machine time, not real time. Unless your system is CPU-bound -- and that would be a very unusual situation -- it's not significant. For the end user, network throughput is usually the constraining factor, plus browser performance (table rendering, for instance).

Anon

This is exactly what I do. This allows me to mix/match.

I found that when some of our sites had every page .php the search engines were not giving any referals.

After changing over (4-6 weeks after the change) we started getting more and more referals!

So it swings it in my mind.

Regards
Darren
http://www.php4hosting.com

Anon

So, on my test server (300 MHz K6-2):

First number is with php parsing off, second with it on. Each is an average of three runs with 100 accesses at 10 concurrent with the following command line:

ab -n 100 -c 10 testmachine/test/test.htm

100 byte file: 162k/sec 74k/sec
500 byte file: 320k/sec 215k/sec
1k file: 460k/sec 328k/sec
4k file: 617k/sec 700k/sec
16k file: 789k/sec 640k/sec

This is a file with NO php code actually in it, just a bunch of text inside the standard HTML/HEAD/TITLE/BODY tags.

This test was run across a 10BaseT network, that was relatively unloaded (i.e. on Friday, hehe)

I currently have the following set to be handled by php on my server:

.php .php3 .html .js .htm

.js is nice because it lets me embed php into my java scripts, which is handy for customizing pop-ups and custom folding menu trees in java.

Anon

What are we comparing this to? What does the data look like for the same files, but not being parsed by php?

Anon

Read it again, it's a plain html file, NO php (as I stated in my previous message) and the two numbers listed for each file are with php parsing off and on. Same file, just with PHP parsing on or off.