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I'm planning on making a website that will have mainly articles and videos. I'm going to post the videos on YouTube and use the YouTube API on my site. What I am wondering, is if I can make a page like this without using any server-side technology, or if I would need server-side programming(PHP, MySQL, etc...) would it be very much? I'm new to web development and as a first webpage, I was hoping to do the whole thing with Client-side technologies(HTML, CSS, JavaScript). Is this feasible?

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2 Answers

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Is it possible? yes.
Is it Practical? no.

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No, because you're dealing with data retrieval and manipulation. I mean client-side scripting is responsible for displaying data and intermediary between browser(front-end) and database(back-end). It is also handles browser functions such as alerts, effects, embedding objects, and etc. Data retrieval and manipulation is handled by server-side scripting such as PHP, Perl, Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, ASP, and etc.

BTW, I strongly encourage you to learn PHP and AJAX(Asynchronous Javascript and XML).

Here is a link which helped me to learn to use youtube API:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-youtubeapi/

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I know some C#. It was the first language I learned. Do you think it would be easier to go with ASP.NET or PHP + AJAX like you said. I'm a beginner with web development(programming too but i've been working with the basics longer). – fender1901 Jun 7 '11 at 16:40
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it is possible, you just need to have some .txt files lying around in the server and a javascript heavy page that AJAX those .txt files and compose it into a full page. I wouldn't personally do it client-side, but it is possible. – Lie Ryan Jun 8 '11 at 0:12
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PHP is hardly a difficult language to learn. SQL is even easier as it is a very small language set (but very powerful). PHP will give you a much greater ability to work on a number of platforms where ASP.net will limit your scope. For example, the web is mostly dominated by *nix servers. While its possible to get ASP.net implementations to run on those servers it isn't likely you'll find one in use. I've been doing web programming for years on many different servers and haven't seen this kind of a set up. Learn PHP and MySQL and AJAX – Kenneth Jun 8 '11 at 1:53
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@fender: Both ASP.NET and PHP are powerful web building tools. ASP.NET is propriety software while PHP is for free. In my experience, I chose PHP because of hosting issues. U can only host ur ASP.NET site "Windows based web hosting" while a lot of hosting providers are offering support for PHP. And PHP is supported by Windows and Linux. – Tom Jun 9 '11 at 6:46
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@fender: This might be irrelevant but I would also like you to take a look at Ruby on Rails. Its becoming more and more popular. Its a very good Rapid Application Development tool. It also has strong community support. I am not really a hater of Microsoft but I think its more practical to go for open source Like PHP and Rails. – Tom Jun 9 '11 at 6:51

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