The Power of Static
Sometimes, simpler is better
In this article I will quickly summarise the concept of the ‘static’ website: what it is, and what its benefits and drawbacks are.
History
In the beginning, all websites were collections of documents, the most significant of which were HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Such documents were simply plain text files, with special embedded commands to describe their structure, which could then be formatted by a web browser. As a basic example:
<p>This is an <strong>example</strong> paragraph.</p>Saved as a file on a computer, such as index.html, this document could be accessed via a URL such as http://example.org/index.html.
As sites grew larger, and documents ever more complicated, various schemes were introduced to improve ‘modularity’; without this, documents (i.e. pages) with the same content — such as a footer — duplicate that content again and again. This is problematic if such content needs to be updated, in which case the same exact edit needs to be made many times over. If an individual page is overlooked, its content becomes outdated.
One early scheme known as ‘Server Side Includes’ allowed a simple instruction — much like the <strong> in the previous example — to indicate that external content…
