The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website

This one hits right on the nose. The idea of PHP’s incremental, linear dynamicity feels so lost in many of today’s technological abstractions.

Here's the problem: mildly dynamic functionality…is too minor to be worth bringing in a web application framework, and spawning and maintaining persistent processes just to serve a website.

What PHP offered is an increase in this effort proportional to the amount of dynamicity to be added to a website. This is something no framework can do…If you have a static website and you want to make it dynamic and you don't use PHP, pretty much all options available to you imply a massive increase in complexity that must be paid up front before you can do anything at all. You bring in a massive framework for the dynamic equivalent of “Hello World”, and then on top of that (if it's a non-PHP framework, meaning persistent processes are probably involved) the process for deploying your website radically changes and becomes far more complex.

This in turn has led to much of the functionality which might have previously been implemented on the server side on a “mildly dynamic” website being moved to JavaScript.

Client-side JavaScript, that is. The idea of dynamicity in a website became something to be outsourced, both in technology and compute (e.g. “just embed this <script>”).

PHP remains the only server-side technology really offering a linear increase in effort for a linear increase in dynamicity.

Suppose you are writing an article about some concept and you want to put some special dynamic widget in the middle of the article, which people can play with to gain an understanding of the concept. This is just one article you're writing, one of countless others; you're not going to spin up an application server (and maintain it indefinitely) just for this throwaway toy widget. The only reasonable implementation options are JavaScript and PHP…

Or, suppose a company makes a webpage for looking up products by their model number. If this page were made in 2005, it would probably be a single PHP page. It doesn't need a framework — it's one SELECT query, that's it. If this page were made in 2022, a conundrum will be faced: the company probably chose to use a statically generated website. The total number of products isn't too large, so instead their developers stuff a gigantic JSON file of model numbers for every product made by the company on the website and add some client-side JavaScript to download and query it. This increases download sizes and makes things slower, but at least you didn't have to spin up and maintain a new application server. This example is fictitious but I believe it to be representative.

the ability to just give a piece of code an URL in 30 seconds, without complex deployment tooling, proprietary APIs or vendor lock-in seems to me a lot more valuable for the things I do