Over time I’ve received a fair amount of questions about these topics: given the complexity of the matter and the big variety of available solutions, it’s not at all surprising that this confusion affects both beginners and experienced developers. There’d be a ton of things to say, but I’ll try to outline a very brief summary that may shed some light on things such as Server-side rendering, Pre-rendering, Static Sites and more recent hybrid approaches. This is not meant to be an exhaustive guide, not at all, it’s just a few lines to orient yourself in this big jungle.
If you notice something wrong in my train of thought, don’t be afraid to let me know in the comments!
Multi-Page Applications
What happens when you visit a website on your browser? Without going much into details, after the domain is resolved, you’ll hit another computer on the internet: that’s a server.
The job of that server is to send you content that you can look at and interact with: typically an HTML file (which describes the structure) with some CSS (styles) and JavaScript (interactivity). Eventually these can be separated into their own files and served at the same time or with a slight delay, but the main thing you’re looking for is the HTML file which contains what you want to see. It’s not HTML’s job to make things…
