html vs. php

Hello all master coders, Cool

I have been doing my site exclusivley in html. What is the big differences bewteen php and html? What are the advantages/disadvantages? What, if any would be the penalty from going from an html site to a php site? Would this hurt the PR I have already gotten as well as the search results? Woud it appear to be a whole new site?

Please discuss.

Thanks in advance.

I am not a pro in php but I gathered from programmer friends that whenever you use php, you can make changes to a single page without affecting the rest. Whereas in html, the changes will have to be site wide. Meaning, a change in one will entail changes with the rest of the pages.

In php, you can keep the layout in one file (index.php) and have it load other files (file1.html and file2.php) (they can load any text document)

It loads in the format index.php?id=file1.html

That will load file1.html in the spot that you put the right code. You can also use mod rewrite in which i can be the forum /index/file1 or something like that. There are so many things you can do with php It would take forever to list in here.

Yep, that is right. Html is very limited in itself. But with php the possibilities are numerous. You can set-up a membership site or develop some scripts that are not allowed with the limited features of html.

Of course you can also use HTML within a php script which is useful. I would recommend borrowing a book on the subject as anything new like this can be extremely annoying if it doesn't work straight away. I guess most of us have spent hours at some time or another peering at pages of apparent nonsense just to find a missing comma or semi colon.

Speaking of PHP loading in "index.php?id=file1.html" format...

How do I make it operate "cleaner" -- just show file1.html and not the php coding it loaded to to get there ?