Can I do php with only Dreamweaver 8? ...

[Karasu]

...What can php do that HTML can't?What did the world do before PHP?

[Disk]

Dreamweaver is mainly HTML with Javascript. I perfer using Notepad for php

[IRelayer]

You can write PHP code with any text editor. Dreamweaver 8 counts (basically: yes). The distinction here is between a scripting language and a markup language. The purpose of HTML (a markup language) is to tell a web browser (or another application that knows about it) how to layout objects on a page (a web page). That is all it can do. These objects can be text, images, applications, misc...The purpose of PHP (a scripting language) is to allow a programmer to write and run a computer program (and often times this computer program runs on a webpage, if that makes it easier to understand). A computer program is a set of instructions to the computer to execute some process or set of processes. For example, you can write a PHP program to login to a database, retrieve information from a database, and then output the information it retrieved to the screen. That last part, the output part, if it is done on a webpage, is enclosed by HTML tags so that the web browser knows where to put everything and how to display it. That is, whatever you get back from the database you can then put into whatever FORMAT you like with HTML. So, put simply, HTML is for formatting information and PHP is for things inputting it, retrieving it, or outputting it...E.G. for doing stuff with the information. Hope that helps.-IR

[drixie]

Technically, you have asked two questions. can you write php scripts with dreamweaver 8? and what can php do that html cant?

For your first question, I prefer to use dreamweaver 8 to write my php scripts than to use any other text editor. You can use dreamweaver 8 to write codes in a series of languages ranging from asp, php, html, css, javascript, and a host of others. The advantage dreamwaver 8 has is that it suggests codes for you in a drop down as you type your code(you have to be in coding enviroment). For php, when you are typing a built-in function, it suggests what you are trying to type so you just choose and press enter. It also tells you the format with which you will enter parameters into the parentheses. It also has a built in Oreilly reference library in case you forgot what a function does. So, dreamweaver 8 is the best application for web development.

as for your second question? php kind of optimizes html. It makes you use html to do things that you cannot normally do with html. You see, they are not the same thing and cannot be compared. You use php to generate html pages basically. A very good example is this forum. This forum was written using php. php then generates the pages in html. if you want to learn more about php and it difference to html, visit www.w3schools.org