[Techtalk] why is Active X in web pages evil, but not Perl/PHP/Javascript?

[Mary]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005, Carla Schroder wrote:
> This is all very helpful, thank you! So it is correct to say that
> using server-side scripting avoids browser compatibility problems?

Server-side scripting is just a way to produce HTML using a programming
language.

It is an on-demand way: when a page with particular properties is needed
for some reason by a viewer, only then do the scripts run on the server
to produce the right page for them. They then get sent over the next as
just plain old HTML -- the only way you can tell they were only just
produced especially for you is the extension on the file name (.php,
.cgi, .pl etc) and even then, not always.

The reason you use it is the same reason you would usually use a
programming languge: because you want to do something multiple times
with subtle variation.  For example, you want to write something that
lets people buy books online. You can either write a server side script
that remembers what books people are buying and shows them a shopping
cart with the books they chose in it, or you hand-write a bunch of HTML
files with every possible combination of books ever :)

You can produce really browser specific HTML with server-side scripting,
just as you can by hand. (Some people even produce Javascript with
server-side scripting -- after all, just as HTML is text to be sent to a
browser, so is Javascript.)

-Mary