Before I order some PHP books, perhaps, I should state what are my initial goals in using PHP.
Initially, there are two tasks I wish to solve:
1. I tell users that the URL for, say, my Sorting topic is [URL=”http://www.standards.com/index.html?Sorting”]http://www.standards.com/index.html?Sorting[URL=”http://www.standards.com/index.html?PageFileUsageMonitor”]http://www.standards.com/index.html?PageFileUsageMonitor
This allows me to chasge the actual URL, without the user having to know the real URL, and eliminates the need for my brain cells to remember the actual URL.
However, thus far, all of my web pages use relative URLs, which facilitates my maintaining a copy of my web site on my PC.
If a user were to click on a link within a downloaded web page, the link would not work unless the user happened to have already downloaded the appropriate files, and placed them in the proper directory hierarchy.
I tried to change my Javascript to test whether a URL existed, and go to the alternative, i.e., the absolute URL. But client-side Javascript does not allow for testing such existence, at least that’s what I was led to beliieve in discussing this in a Javascript forum several years ago.
I have not tried server side Javascript because I was unsure what I would be allowed to place on the server.
I ASSuME that PHP can solve this issue.
Would PHP be a better solution than server side Javascript?
2. My other issue is even more important.
I’d like to be able to require the user to choose, say, an “I Agree” button before permitting a file to be downloaded. I believe that I could do this with Javascript, but, as I understand it, using Javascript would reveal the actual URL of the file, allowing the user to bypass the “I Agree” and download the file.
I’ve been told that using PHP, I could effectively hide the string containg the file URL. Is that true? Do I need a “PHP compiler” to achieve this?