I’ve now got some very good understanding of (X)HTML and CSS, and plan to move on. My next choices are PHP and JS (and don’t know if I’ll ever end up learning one of them, but I would love to).
So, I need to choose one of them. I have learnt that PHP is server-side programming and JavaScript is client-side programming, and I am NOT asking you to compare the two of them for me. What I would like to know is, can I do anything (or most of) in PHP that can be done with JS? (or put it this way, can do everything people use JS for, on the server-side with PHP?)
Instances include, using PHP instead of JS in web themes, real-time content display (as in live blogging, live comments etc), effects etc.
This might seem dumb, and there’s definitely a reason why people use JS in all the above instances, but since I cannot (really) learn the two of them, thought I should ask for some advise here.
EDIT: Would it be possible to reload only a part of a web page (not the entire web page) every few seconds with PHP? That should be good enough for the real-time application that I am planning.
For nice user experience (dynamic menu, ajax, effects, … ) you need client-side programming and for dynamic content you (almost always) need server-side programming.
In short, you need both.