Client-Side, Static, and Server-Side Rendering

In this post I want to look primarily at SSR and STR (static rendering) placing these methods in the larger context of the web dev landscape and then comparing and contrasting them to CSR (Client-Side Rendering).

Client Side + Static Rendering — A Tale of Two Extremes

A Little History

I started web development in 2010, in a landscape in which Javascript was beginning to dominate the web, and the majority of new websites were making a concerted effort to move their websites from traditional web platforms and languages, and use JS for more and more features of their websites.

One of these features was the rendering of the content of their applications (HTML and Text) using Javascript. The previous generation of websites had been written largely in software like PHP (which powers wordpress) or ASP.NET (a Microsoft software development platform) that were nearly if not entirely rendered on the serverside and then passed to the client at runtime.

The JS apps ‘of the future’ promised to be more responsive because they carried a lot of the state of the application on the front end, allowing the website to react to changes made by users more quickly and fluidly. Clients didn’t need to make full requests back to the server if they wanted to update only a small fraction of the page. During 2010, for example, I wasn’t even taught the difference between these two methods because it was assumed…