I'm continuing the project I talked about in another thread here, but at the moment I have stopped because I can't figure out how to dynamically add content to the page. It's supposed to be a webapp that runs locally (it won't be hosted on a domain).
I thought I'd be able to do it with JS, however I found out it can't read files for security reasons. What I was planning to do was get a list of all the files and folders inside a given directory (using JS), then append a div for each folder (with more stuff inside) inside the content area of my page. Seeing how I couldn't do that with JS, I thought maybe I could do it with PHP using the same approach, but I didn't like the idea of having to run xampp just for this... if there's a way to have PHP running without xampp and/or a server, then it'd be great, but so far I haven't found anything about that... except downloading PHP, but I have no clue how to "use" the console from the browser and then have it append the divs to the page, since the console and the browser are "separated". To make it a little more clear: is there a way to run PHP without a server, and if not, what other languages can I look up to?
At this point I'd also like to know how websites such as clipchamp.com work. Do you guys have a clue about that?