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Giwrgos Gkogkas
Giwrgos Gkogkas

Reputation: 479

Return HTML in PHP JSON response

I am building an app to save small notes and comments. The app will require from you to submit a title and it will provide you a text area for your text.

Until now when you submit a title I create with jquery a title - text area pair for you to type your text.

I was thinking to return the pair through JSON, but someone told me that this is bad practice.

Is it really bad practice to return HTML through Jason and why?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2686

Answers (4)

Swastik Padhi
Swastik Padhi

Reputation: 1909

It really depends on how you plan to implement your idea. As you mentioned JSON, my best guess is you are trying to implement AJAX. Well, while it's possible to return almost any type of content encoded as a JSON object, I don't see why you would need to send HTML elements like text-area from the server through JSON. AJAX is used for scenarios where a server request is made and the client wants to get the response without refreshing the page from which the request was sent. The most common usage is username and password validation on login pages.

I think you should get a clear picture of server-side scripting and client-side scripting. What you have already implemented using jquery is known as client-side scripting and that's exactly how it should be done. As for fetching data from PHP, that's done when you need to read some data from the database residing on the server. Say, the text-area is displayed only if a valid title, that has an entry in the database, has been entered. And I don't see any requirement of that here.

Upvotes: 1

Ashish Choudhary
Ashish Choudhary

Reputation: 2034

JOSN was made to overcome the bulky XML format used for data exchanging. It really is a light weight data-exchange format as described by James. Suppose: You need to display a dynamic list of products having all the info related to a product. If you return full HTML in the JSON its size is 2048 characters. But if you only return product name and realted info without the HTML markup then the response text string size will be less than 2048 characters, it can be 100 characters only because you are omitting the HTML markup which is not really required. SO you can just have the light-weight version of the data and then insert it in the HTML markup using client side script. This will make your application faster because you will have to wait less for the server response as the data size is small and transferring small amount of data(characters) will always be quicker than large data(characters).

XML contained heavy markup therefore JSON was looked as an alternative for faster data transfer.

Upvotes: 1

rawb
rawb

Reputation: 2426

A few closely related questions:

Why is it a bad practice to return generated HTML instead of JSON? Or is it?

How dangerous is it send HTML in AJAX as opposed to sending JSON and building the HTML?

As far as I know, it's not bad practice to return a HTML string within a JSON object. The accepted answer for that second question seems to agree:

Request and return JSON for large datasets, but include the (escaped) HTML snippet for each record in the JSON record. This means more rendering time and more bandwidth use than (2), but can reduce duplication of often complex HTML rendering.

Upvotes: 1

James
James

Reputation: 119

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format http://www.json.org/

The HTML DOM structure should be created and use JSON for exchanging data.

Once you've retrieved the data creating dynamic dom elements is fair game.

Upvotes: 1

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