[lubujackson]

Slapping PHP tags inside an HTML file was a more natural "outside-in" sort of introduction to programming for the web than Perl's approach. If you already knew some HTML and wanted to add a widget to a page, PHP made that dead simple.

[bornfreddy]

Also, you could just FTP the files to the hosted server and it would magically work. No other language that I know of allowed that at the time.

[timeon]

It seems to be lost art now. Running it locally however was different story.