How can i tell if a website is HTML or PHP?

It's pretty hard to find out what the server side is running on. That said, anyone know of a concrete way to do it?

You can do that easily by getting the code of that site or that web page. If you save then you will get some code by which you can determine whether that site is using the html or php code.

Sorry dear you can never predict correctly what a site on runs from its code. I run my WP sites with .html, .php and .asp extensions in pages and posts (different extension on different sites). So people giving reason to check index.html or index.php is totally lame. You can run php in asp pages, asp in php and html runs in both. You can make html extension as asp or asp as php or php as html based on how you configure your server file handling and htaccess.

I would also like to hear if there is some way to find this out.

I'm sure some ipwhois services tell you what a server is running , maybe also you can telnet in on port 80?
Also try navigate to a non existent page, may sometimes give a clue.

If not check source, sometimes you'll see some reference to the language it's running on.

Languages are parsed into HTML on the browsers. Forfums like Vbulletin(which is used for BHW) are on PHP. you can't tell them from page extention because sometimes you can have URL with .htm ot html with php. If there is no extention then it becomes harder and you have to check the directories from which the images and the content is fetched to figure it out.

HTML is a markup language and PHP is a scripting language. PHP will output HTML when compiled. You can output HTML in a .php file but you cannot output php in a .html file. If a site is interactive eg. using a membership system like vbulletin, then it will be using a scripting language for the back-end programming. If it isn't then there is no reason to use a scripting language for the front end development.

I think we 've beaten this simple question to death Thread closed.