Originally, the web consisted of only static web pages.
Each static web page was stored on the server as a separate HTML file.
When you view a static web page in your browser, the HTML rendered on your screen
is the same HTML document stored on the web server.
This means the HTML document on the web server is not changed or
customized before being served to the client.
As a developer, if you want to change the look or content of a static web page,
then you must change the corresponding HTML document.
Sometimes, making a small change to a web page may require you to update many
HTML documents to keep things consistent across the whole website.
Since all changes require manual developer intervention,
static websites are typically used for presenting information that does not
change very often, like personal websites or publications.
In 1993, dynamic web pages emerged in response to
the lack of customizability and scalability imposed by static web pages.
A dynamic web page is generated by an application at the time of access.
Unlike a static web page, the web page does not exist on the server beforehand.
For a dynamic web page,
the web server passes on the request to an application to handle.
The application can perform a computation, look up some information in a database, or
request information from a web service, which produces dynamic content as output.
The application can generate an HTML document for the server.
And then the server sends that back to your web browser,
which in turn displays it to you.
As a developer, it is easier to make changes to dynamic websites compared to
static websites, because you only need to change one database element or
variable in your application to make a change anywhere on the dynamic website.