3 ms·

If you were a corporate/academic programmer at the time, or lucky enthusiast, you had access to more things. Most commoner folk stepping up to a local ISP shell

If you were a corporate/academic programmer at the time, or lucky enthusiast, you had access to more things. Most commoner folk stepping up to a local ISP shell from BBS did not have access to all kinds of goodies. There also was less formal education available, so even when technologies existed, without mainstream marketing and documentation, it simply wasn't accessible to the masses. Cold Fusion was proprietary software from Macromedia you had to pay for, as I recall. Some admins were restrictive, and didn't even like you compiling your own stuff. PHP really was responsible for the dynamic web. It had enough community support to enable newbies to wrap their head around the mind-boggling shift to dynamic server-side websites, and it became commonly provided with cheap or free shared hosting. A big reason why it succeeded was because it was possible for people who only understood HTML to transition, since a PHP file could be nothing but HTML to start with, and people used a lot of templating rather than start from scratch with code that echoed out HTML. With things like Perl, it was not an HTML templating script first, and so that made it less streamlined and simple for the task of making websites.

acdha 11y ago
Again, PHP made it better and easier but you aren't going to convince me that my direct experience didn't exist simply by repeating the same assertion. Before PHP became widespread in the very late 90s there were many options for dynamic apps. I worked with ISPs which offered CGI or SSI even on cheap / free plans. Sure, it was ugly but a ton of people got what they needed done by going over to Matt's Script Archive and finding something they could hammer into shape. Before antique PHP apps, the security cliché was formmail.pl & a slew of long-forgotten guestbook / forum scripts. I'm not saying that PHP didn't help considerably, only that it was very far from first. I remember having to make the case for using PHP 2 or 3 instead of many of those alternatives and it was based on cost and convenience, not the ability to do anything new.
- mei0Iesh 11y ago
  I didn't say first, I said responsible, and first doesn't really matter. Albert Einstein's e=mc^2 wasn't first, it was already published by someone else written slightly differently. But he made it popular, and that's what counts for widespread adoption and propagation of tech. You sound like an older hardcore nerd. You're from a different planet. What was going on in your circles was not at all a reflection of the web on a whole. Most people didn't even use ISPs in those times, they were on private systems like AOL. The dynamic web we know today, where almost every website is not static HTML, is because the majority of people making any little website had access to PHP, and free tutorials to learn.

acdha 11y ago

Again, PHP made it better and easier but you aren't going to convince me that my direct experience didn't exist simply by repeating the same assertion. Before PHP became widespread in the very late 90s there were many options for dynamic apps. I worked with ISPs which offered CGI or SSI even on cheap / free plans. Sure, it was ugly but a ton of people got what they needed done by going over to Matt's Script Archive and finding something they could hammer into shape. Before antique PHP apps, the security cliché was formmail.pl & a slew of long-forgotten guestbook / forum scripts. I'm not saying that PHP didn't help considerably, only that it was very far from first. I remember having to make the case for using PHP 2 or 3 instead of many of those alternatives and it was based on cost and convenience, not the ability to do anything new.

mei0Iesh 11y ago
I didn't say first, I said responsible, and first doesn't really matter. Albert Einstein's e=mc^2 wasn't first, it was already published by someone else written slightly differently. But he made it popular, and that's what counts for widespread adoption and propagation of tech. You sound like an older hardcore nerd. You're from a different planet. What was going on in your circles was not at all a reflection of the web on a whole. Most people didn't even use ISPs in those times, they were on private systems like AOL. The dynamic web we know today, where almost every website is not static HTML, is because the majority of people making any little website had access to PHP, and free tutorials to learn.