Static Website
A static web page (sometimes called a flat page or a stationary page) is a web page that is delivered to the user’s web browser exactly as stored in contrast to dynamic web pages which are generated by a web application.
Consequently, a static web page often displays the same information for all users, from all contexts, subject to modern capabilities of a web server to negotiate content-type or language of the document where such versions are available and the server is configured to do so.
However, a site’s scripts can introduce dynamic functionality, which may make a static web page appear dynamic.
Static web pages are often HTML documents stored as files in the file system and made available by the web server over HTTP (nevertheless URLs ending with “.html” are not always static).
However, loose interpretations of the term could include web pages stored in a database, and could even include pages formatted using a template and served through an application server, as long as the page served is unchanging and presented essentially as stored.
Static web pages are suitable for content that never or rarely needs to be updated, though modern web template systems are changing this. Maintaining large numbers of static pages as files can be impractical without automated tools, such as static site generators. Any personalization or interactivity has to run client-side, which is restricting.
Dynamic Website
A server-side dynamic web page is a web page whose construction is controlled by an application server processing server-side scripts. In server-side scripting, parameters determine how the assembly of every new web page proceeds, including the setting up of more client-side processing.
A client-side dynamic web page processes the web page using JavaScript running in the browser as it loads. JavaScript can interact with the page via Document Object Model, or DOM, to query page state and modify it. Even though a web page can be dynamic on the client-side, it can still be hosted on a static hosting service such as GitHub Pages or Amazon S3 as long as there isn’t any server-side code included.
A dynamic web page is then reloaded by the user or by a computer program to change some variable content. The updating information could come from the server, or from changes made to that page’s DOM. This may or may not truncate the browsing history or create a saved version to go back to, but a dynamic web page update using AJAX technologies will neither create a page to go back to, nor truncate the web browsing history forward of the displayed page.
Using AJAX, the end user gets one dynamic page managed as a single page in the web browser while the actual web content rendered on that page can vary. The AJAX engine sits only on the browser requesting parts of its DOM, the DOM, for its client, from an application server. A particular application server could offer a standardized REST style interface to offer services to the web application.
DHTML is the umbrella term for technologies and methods used to create web pages that are not static web pages, though it has fallen out of common use since the popularization of AJAX, a term which is now itself rarely used. Client-side-scripting, server-side scripting, or a combination of these make for the dynamic web experience in a browser.
source : wikipedia
