Advanced Web Design: A Primer

Which is Better?

If, until now, you’ve mainly dabbled in HTML, you may be asking yourself, “Which is better, client-side or server-side?” While this is a natural question to ask, the fact of the matter is that neither is better than the other. Instead, they each have advantages and disadvantages, and it’s up to you to determine which is the best choice for any given application.

Client-side technologies such as JavaScript and DHTML tend to be very “nimble” in terms of their ability to affect what is displayed on the user’s screen. These technologies, running right inside the Web browser itself, have direct access to things like browser windows and Web page elements, and can modify these in response to user actions such as mouse movements and clicks. The weakness that all client-side technologies share is their reliance on browser support, which rarely turns out to be the same on different browsers.

This limitation is completely surmounted by server-side technologies, which run entirely on the Web server, and thus only need to work properly on that one computer to produce identical results on every Web browser in the world. Server-side technologies, however, removed as they are from the web browser, cannot do anything to modify a page once it has been sent to the Web browser for display until the Web browser requests another page (usually when the user clicks a link or submits a form). Server-side technologies also tend to be more complicated to set up, as they require you to make modifications to your Web server software’s configuration.

For these reasons, most modern Web pages are created using a combination of client- and server-side technologies. Server-side is used wherever reliability, cross-browser compatibility, and direct access to resources like databases are required. When a server-side technology isn’t “nimble” enough to produce the desired results, a little client-side technology can often be added to the mix to provide the right balance of power and responsiveness to user input.