Dynamic Pages? Dynamic Pages?!? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Dynamic Pages!
Hopefully if you're reading this, you've got some experience under the belt for creating websites using HTML. Maybe you've played around with a visual web page editor (DreamWeaver or GoLive, if your experience to date has been with FrontPage, please move along, the exit's the first door on the left.) You should also have experience with hand coding HTML. If the code below doesn't make sense to you, please grab an O'Rielly book on HTML coding and play around for a while...

<table width='200' border='2' cellspacing='2' cellpadding='2'><TR>
<TD><B>Hello World!</B></TD>
</TR></table>

Finally, you may even have some experience with other scripting languages, such as Javascript, ASP, PHP or Perl. This is a good thing as you have been exposed to logical syntax based thought.

If you've used Javascript, it's a scripting language that runs on (and depends on) the website visitor's browser software. This software runs your "programming" and is called a client side scripting language. The other languages are similar to WebCatalog in that they are server side scripting languages. This means that all of the executuion of your code happens on the server before the page is sent to the website visitor. Therefor, the capabilitiees of their browser is not nearly as important as it is for javascript.

All fine and dandy, but what's a dynamic page? For that matter, what's a static page?
A static page is a web page that has been created with content that does not changed unless the html file is changed on the server. This is how all web pages in the early days of the internet started. Almost all personal webpages are still created this way, with software such as DreamWeaver or FrontPage (yuck.)

Shortly after that, some people wanted more out of their webpages, but they didn't want to have to manually change the page each time they wanted the page to change. For example, let's just say you want to have the current time showing on a webpage. At the point you add the code to do this, the page becomes dynamic because the server will "insert" the current time the page was served into the page, thus changing the page received each time it is loaded (humanclock.com) Obviously, you wouldn't want to have to sit around all day, constantly changing the date and time on a page, and reuploading it to a server every minute of every day, that would be tedious, which is why these dynamic pages exist. A more complicated example would be programming on the server that checks the inventory of an item, before sending the webpage to the website visitor, showing the quantity avaliable of that item on the page as the viewer sees the page.

Ok, so how do we get started? well, let's take a look at how to put today's date and time on our pages...

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