PHP (which, after much debate, has been decided to stand for
Hypertext Preprocessor) is a "a server-side, cross-platform, HTML
embedded scripting language." The PHP language is quite powerful
and allows a Webmaster to create extremely sophisticated Web pages.
Like Perl "CGI" scripts, PHP programs are executed "on-the-fly"
by your Web server. Unlike Perl, PHP scripts are embedded within
your HTML file itself, making the program easier to read, debug
and understand at a glance.
Furthermore, PHP contains many Web-specific functions that
facilitate advanced Web features such as form interpretation, cookies,
http-header manipulation, database access, automatic headers and
footers, dynamic page generation, etc.
