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GeneratingPages

Near the top of most browsers is an Address or Location bar that displays the URL (UniformResourceLocator) of the web page that you're currently looking at. On this page, it looks like:

http://www.wasteflake.com/tiki-index.php?page=GeneratingPages

This is the way your browser addresses the page. When you clicked on the link with this URL, your browser issued a GET command to the web server located at www.wasteflake.com with a path of tiki-index.php and query string of page=GeneratingPages.

In a static web site, the path would be a reference to an .html or .htm page which would have been copied back to your browser in response to the GET command. In the case of a dynamic site like this the page is generated by executing a script on the server. In this case the name of the script is tiki-index.php. The result of executing the TikiIndexScript is an page consisting of html and javascript.

Most browsers provide a menu command which will let you view the page source (often called View Source). When you look at the source (and I recommend you take a least a peek), the first line will begin with:

<!DOCTYPE html

indicating that the response is in fact an html document. If you spend sometime rooting around in the source (and that will depend on your tolerance for raw html) you'll find that the <head> tag defines the title and loads the main javascript that tells the browser how the various buttons work.

The <body> tag will be pages and pages long but is organized into two main divisions (set off by <div ="xx"> at the beginning and by </div> at the end): tiki-top and tiki-mid. Currently we have suppressed the bottom division to keep things simple. The tiki-mid division is further divided into a tiki-left and tiki-center division (there used to be a tiki-right division before we reconfigured). All of this stuff is the output of the TikiIndexScript.

Created by steve. Last Modification: Sunday 07 of December, 2003 11:46:35 EST by steve.