HTML Question?

Question

Ok. big sites like amazon. Do they have a page for each listing, i doubt it, and i have book site. i used to have all info on each page, but would like to seperate them. any scripts like that? iframes?

Answer 1

They use "cgi code" of some sort ("asp", "ASP.Net", "Java", "ColdFusion" or "Pearl") to pretend that the page is there. The real data is in the database and the generated page is returned. Normally these pages don't exist at all.

I have built code like this in ASP.Net, Microsoft's advanced web development code for my shopping carts and some content management sites.

For example, the user browses to http://www.centralcoastcandies.com/products/Malted-Milk-Balls-1.aspx

The code (behind the scenes) detects that this is looking for a product page - perhaps because of "/product/" being in the path. So instead of returning non-existant "/products/Malted-Milk-Balls-1.aspx" it returns a page with a url-encoding like "/ViewProduct.aspx?productid=2" without affecting the navigation url that the user sees. The ViewProduct.aspx page can figure out how to properly display products for different product id's because of the "cgi code" that happens before this is displayed.

Answer 2

As others have already stated, Amazon uses what is known as a "Server-Side" scripting language. What this essentially means is that they use a basic template for all the product pages, and they use each books' specific id to insert all the details of this book from a database.

For example, they may use a MySQL database to update book details, which is much easier than updating the HTML. Then, when someone clicks on a link for book number five, it searches the database for all the pertinent information on books with an id of 5, and inserts it into the basic template.

To do this yourself, you would need a server-side scripting language such as php or asp.net, and a database such as MySQL. There are plenty of web developers available with enough expertise to build you a site like this, Or you could learn all of this yourself.

Answer 3

Amazon uses a database and server-scripts to pull from the page. You could do the same with PHP or something similar.

Answer 4

they use a server side script with a database. you could achieve something similar without server side scripting using xml(xml would hold all your data) and xsl which would result in xhtml. look up XSLT.

http://www.w3schools.com/

look on the tutorials to the left.

good luck.

Answer 5

u can load them from external life like *.html or even *.txt
using ajax among others. [google "ajax"]

it even better coz u can easily edit *.txt without messing up HTML codes