When you open a website in your browser, you see a single page filled with text and media (graphics, photos, video, and so on), like the page in a magazine or newspaper is a single entity made up of text and images. But what you see in a browser window is created from a series of instructions: the HTML code. So ultimately, the HTML is the single entity behind what you see onscreen; the equivalent of the printed page.

However, there’s an important difference between an HTML page and a printed page. The HTML that’s fed to your browser may be a single entity when it arrives at the browser, but it may or may not be a single entity sitting on the server waiting for browsers to retrieve it, like a magazine on a newsstand waiting to be purchased. The HTML may be made up of chunks of code that get assembled into a whole in that split second when the browser pulls it off the shelf.

The Fundamental Difference

That’s the difference between dynamic and static web pages. Static pages are complete sets of HTML waiting to be retrieved, whereas dynamic pages are chunks of HTML that are assembled at the moment of retrieval into a single entity that’s displayed in your browser (some systems store the most recent static version of a dynamically created page to keep the server from being overworked, but ultimately, the browser pages were created dynamically)

What I want you to take away from this lesson, in particular, but the book in general, is to reject static thinking in favor of dynamic. You might have a vision right now for the content of a particular page on your website, but if you learn to view the content in chunks, there may be ways to use part of that content on another page as well. Dynamic thinking means you want to keep that chunk of content separate and reusable, not welded to the other content.

The fundamental difference between a static and a dynamic website lies in how the server delivers content to the user: a static website serves pre-built, identical files to every visitor, while a dynamic website generates content in real time based on user behavior, time, location, or login status.

Direct Comparison

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