Static? Dynamic?

On Tue, 29 Jun 1999, Dan Connolly wrote:

> Russell Steven Shawn O'Connor wrote:
> > HTML was designed to serve up more or less static pages.
> 
> Huh? Please cite a source.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what people mean by static and dynamic.

By static I mean the information at a URI is relatively constant.  One
shouldn't expect the contents of the URI to become out dated in the time
it takes to read the page.  As Grahame Grieve just put it, "why should a
user perceive any difference between a page they got from going back and a
page they got from going forward?"  I'd say the answer it that they
shouldn't.  If the information on the page is changing that fast, then
there should be an applet there (or something) that itself keeps the page
up to date.

From one point of view, looking up a query inot a telephone database is
dynamic.  The page doesn't really exist anywhere, and is created on the
fly.  But it another respect it seems static, virtualy static as it were.
The same URI for the query will more or less always return the same
result.  A user can't tell that the page is dynamicaly created because it
acts exactly the same way any other page acts.  So from a users stand
point one would consider these pages static.

... Am I making any sense here?

-- 
Russell O'Connor                           roconnor@uwaterloo.ca
    <URL:http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/%7Eroconnor/>
``And truth irreversibly destroys the meaning of its own message''
-- Anindita Dutta, ``The Paradox of Truth, the Truth of Entropy''

Received on Tuesday, 29 June 1999 17:42:13 UTC