CSS

[banikian]

What is the advantage of using CSS or PHP instead of just old plain HTML? It seems like HTML can do everything that CSS and PHP can do.
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market samurai ~ marketsamurai ~ marketsamurai.com

[RealBlackStuff]

NOT a Windows question.
Do a Google with "advantage of using CSS". The answer is out there (tons of it).

[yak]

It seems like HTML can do everything that CSS and PHP can do.

That's just plain wrong.

CSS gives you much more control over how the pages look like. You have control over every pixel. Pure HTML can't do that. Besides, the recent practice is to use HTML as a data container only and layout the page entirely using CSS. This lets you quickly switch designs too.

Both HTML and CSS are served to the client's browser which renders the page on the screen by combining them.

PHP is an entirely different beast. It runs on the server and dynamically (i.e. every time a client requests a page) generates the HTML (or other files) before they are sent back to the client.

Take this forum page for example. Every time you open a thread, the thread ID is sent in the URL to the server. The PHP running there uses this ID to get the posts from the database and generates a HTML for the browser. The browser renders this HTML by applying the layout from a CSS file(s) referenced in the HTML header.