How how does PHP works with HTML, a browser and a web server

Question

how how does PHP works with HTML, a browser and a web server

help would be very much appreciated

Answer 1

Its a long story but I'll try to keep things short:

A web server is a "service" that runs on a computer. Its purpose is to serve "web pages" to "browsers" that request it using the "http" protocol. Besides web pages, the web server also serves related resources such as images, style-sheets, text files, media and so on.

HTML is a markup language used to display documents in browsers. Its basically plain text, formatting tags and links.

PHP is a server side "scripting language". It usually runs an an extension on the web server. When a browser requests a HTML file, it is usually sent as-is. But if the browser requests a PHP file, the server fires the PHP engine and asks it to process the requested file. The response generated by the PHP engine is sent to the browser.

Usually, PHP scripts contain instructions to fetch data from database based on user input, process it and output the results formatted using HTML.