Dynamic Versus Static Web Content
In the early days of the web, content was
almost entirely static HTML and text documents. A static
document is simply any web page that is saved to disk and passed
back to a requesting browser without changes. Even today,
probably most web pages are static pages though the balance is
certainly shifting. If you count by the number of pages that are
actually viewed as opposed to the number of pages sitting on
millions of web sites waiting to be seen, then I expect the clear
majority of pages today are dynamic.
A dynamic web page is any web page which has
content that is changed by a program or script at the time the
page is requested. Common examples of trivial dynamic pages are
those that display a visitor counter or the current date and
time.
More useful are the results pages that are
returned when a user submits a web form. The form itself may be
static or dynamic but the results page should always be dynamic
unless the form is someone's idea of a bad practical joke.
Presumably when you enter variable data into a form and that form
is processed, the results should be variable. Frequently forms
are the front ends to some kind of query and directly control
what data is displayed as a result of submitting the form. Even
if the form is simply collecting information for an email to
someone or to save data into a database, one would expect a
results page that indicated the operation was successful or
unsuccessful.
Other examples of dynamic pages are pages that
allow a user to set preferences regarding what kind of
information will be displayed. Less obvious examples of dynamic
pages are those that are automatically tailored to what the site
developers believe are the visitor's interests based on past
pages viewed, products purchased or words searched for. Most of
the large search engines now display advertising based on the
content of what the user is searching for; the products being
advertised in some way relate to the words the visitor is
searching on.
Finally some sites are entirely dynamic
because all web content is stored in a database and assembled
into a web page on the fly when the page is requested. Typically
these are intended to reduce site maintenance by having users who
do not know HTML enter content into the databases via an easy to
use proprietary front end. When the content is retrieved it is
merged with a template that provides components that are common
to the whole site or subsections of the site and also includes
components that control the style of presentation for the user
entered data.
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