ABSTRACT
In the beginning, people created HTML pages by typing them in. They quickly realized that a lot of pages share a lot of content: navigation menus, contact info, and so on. The nearly universal response was to create a template and embed commands to include other snippets of HTML and loop over data structures to create lists and tables. Server-side generation can be done statically or dynamically, i.e., pages can be compiled once, stored on disk, and served thereafter, or each page can be recompiled whenever it’s needed, which makes it easy to include dynamic elements like top news story. As browsers and JavaScript became more powerful, the balance shifted toward client-side page generation. In this model, the browser fetches data from one or more servers and feeds that data to a JavaScript library that generates HTML in the browser for display.
