Would it be better to parse HTML on the server with PHP or on the end user side with JavaScript?

Question

I need to write a script that takes a link and parses the HTML of the linked page to pull in the title and a few other pieces of data like potentially a short description much like when you link to something on Facebook.

It will be called when a user adds a link to the site, so could see a decent number of hits when the client launches the site.

I am curious if I should do this on the server side with PHP or the end user side with Javascript? I have been writing the logic behind trying to figure out which areas of the markup are filled with potential content and it made me wonder if the load would be too much if I continue in PHP.

The client has just the one decent web server and I worry parsing/analyzing HTML pages may be too much load where we could do it in Javascript and farm it out to the user adding the link.

Any advice or thoughts on the matter would be awesome. Thank you.

Edit: This data is not going straight into the database, it is used to help the user by auto filling the description of their link which still goes through my regular vetting before being stored to the DB.

Answer 1

Well, this is an easy one, because performing this from the client-side purely with JavaScript just plain isn't an option at all due to the same origin policy.

Parsing HTML isn't that heavy of a task, you should be fine doing it in PHP.