The static web page is the earliest form of the website. It is the native and natural state of the web page in the beginning time. It is the Eden before Adam and Eve ate the apple (I know actually it was not an apple though).
Whether consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or involuntarily, it is inevitable that human beings will leave the Garden of Eden. But at the same time, humankind’s nostalgia and yearning for the Garden of Eden is also rooted in our genes. Like it or not, face or ignore it (or contempt), there are always people who want to go back to the past and return to the innocence.
The same is true of the Internet.
Therefore, even today, with the rapid development of the Internet, there are still many people who are thinking about a static web page, and there are still many real static web pages on the Internet. Please note that I have highlighted the three words of the **real static web ** since I really mean that.
The so-called real static web page is a page written purely in HTML or XML or even simply TXT. All three can be opened directly by the browser. Txt is the content itself; XML has a lot of tags designed to focus on the logical structure of the content, and HTML not only focuses on the logical structure of the content but also on how it looks in the browser ( CSS is developed by these concerns and come into another big branch of the web application).
XML code example:
<note>
<to> Xiaofang</to>
<from> Big Black Cow</from>
<heading> is a sprinkle </heading>
<body> Are you okay? Just miss you. happy Birthday! </body>
</note>
There’s no need to display a TXT example, any part of this article is a TXT module.
HTML example:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>What is a Static Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>What is a Static Page</h1>
<p>Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.</p>
</body>
</html>
Please note, the “!DOCTYPE HTML” has been evolved for “thousands of years” to become the present simple appearance. It was like this way “a thousand years ago”:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">
The content in the title tag is not displayed in the browser front end, all the content in the head tag is not displayed in the front end of the browser. They are default data required by the browser, and some are for search engines.
What we can see in the browser is the content wrapped by the body tag. For example, the h1 tag is the title of the web content; and the p tag is used to wrap the paragraph text.
If the above html does not add any CSS style, then it looks quite “rough and unrestrained” in the browser, probably like this:
What is a Static Page
Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.
However, HTML and CSS work together, have produced quite a lot of amazing features these years. There are thousands and hundreds of choices in fonts, colours and background options. Many cool anime effects, such as the title can be entered into the page from an imaginary position from any place you can’t imagine, and the body can also add animation effects. Powered by JavaScript, these days the so-called “static page” is now very “moving”.
Of course, the word “static” is not saying the page’s performance, it means that its content is consistent with the original input, and will not change by any operation of the front-end user – I mean the substantial change.
So, unless you are a big fan of fundamentalism, today’s static pages are quite different from the original static pages, and the two can still share the name “static pages” is due to they still have the same common commonality, which is that the core data (content) displayed at the front end is still provided by the original content, rather than by some other third parties (such as back end language + database).
As a result, the static pages we are talking about now have changed dramatically compared to the earliest static pages. The current static page is static page 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 or even n.0 version. The reason why we still talk about static pages today is that there’re many people, especially those who are very persistent in minimalist, are reluctant to use “large and complicated” server resources when the data is quite simple and the interaction is not frequent.
Let’s say a blog website, the biggest demand for this kind of application is to display the graphic and text in a proper way. It is unnecessary to make a complicated database to store the simple, contents, and then pass through another back end processing program to encourage it, then spit it out and give it to the browser – so many processes in the middle are just a process from content to content. Instead of this, it is better to load the content into various tags of HTML directly, and the browser calls the HTML file directly. Or, [Markdown][2] is another more succinct, lightweight markup language that fits the blog’s writing needs. By the way, this article was edited with Markdown, and I have used no more than five tags.
A static page is more than just a technical term. It is also a philosophy issue as well as a life attitude. Driven by this minimalist ideal, along with JavaScript + HTML + CSS + another simple language that drives html, such as Jekyll, we can implement the need to express a blog with static pages. For related content, please refer to Jekyll + GitHub page – Personal Blog Perfect Combination