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→How Does PHP Work?
where it is rendered just like any other web page. The fact that the web page originally contained PHP is completely transparent to the web browser.
The above example is certainly an oversimplification of the pwer of PHP. Some may question why one would use PHP to output some static text that could have been achieved more easily using an HTML tag. The fact is, however, HTML only makes sense if you know before hand exactly what needs to be displayed in the web page. Imagine instead, that you are developing an online banking application. One of the pages you need to display must contain the customer's bank account number combined with the current balance. Obviously this information is going to be different for each customer. In this scenario you would develop an HTML page that essentially serves as a template for the page, and then embed PHP into the page to extract the account and balance information from a database. Once processed by the PHP module integrated into the web server, this customer specific content will then appear in the HTML pages in place of the PHP script when the page is loaded into the browswer window.
== Why is PHP so Useful? ==
