Associate one element with another

I think you were close with JQuery. PHP itself is server side processing. For dynamic pages you either need some form of JavaScript or many server queries to update the page. The Laravel framework has Livewire which sends data to the server & receives page updates it inserts into the browser view. From my limited research, something similar may be accomplished with htmx but I am not sure.

I too am interested in hearing from more experienced developers. I miss using Livewire after moving from Laravel to Codeigniter.