I've seen, and been part of, multiple heated conversations about the meaning of the phrase "static web site" is and what types of things it defines. For any communication I think we need to take as a premise that static HTML and static web sites are not the same category of thing. Any particular page on the web can be totally static or totally dynamic or a mix. There are static HTML pages on static web sites. There are dynamic HTML pages on static web sites. There are static HTML pages on dynamic web sites. And there are dynamic HTML pages on dynamic web sites.

The meaning of static HTML is the least contentious. A static HTML page is just an .html (or .htm, or anything else if the mimetype is set right) hypertext markup langage document that is stored on a file system as a file and sent to the end user when they request the URL that maps to that file. The HTML encodes what the web site user will see and does not change.

When the static .html file includes "static" (not really since it is executed code) javascript (or other executing language embeds) that changes the page to something other than displayed by the html in the file on disk. So it becomes a dynamic HTML page (for a while called "DHTML").

The only place where static HTML becomes unclear is in the case where some webserver linked program generates the static HTML on demand with no storage of the HTML as a file on the filesystem before being sent to the site user. In this case even though the user sees only static HTML there's crucially no file ever created on the webserver so it's dynamic HTML.

The meaning of static website is increasingly more unclear compounding on the fuzziness of what a static HTML page is. Generally there are the same two points of view as above but with a tweak.

There's the website users point of view where a static web site is static if the pages are just HTML and do not require executing any code to view. If you (or your browser) look at the source you can read the text and see the image URLs. It does not have to be generated by the browser's execution of some client side code.

Then there's the developer point of view where a static web site if the code required to generate the website is stored in a static file on the webserver. In this framing you can deploy a self contained .html file which includes the javascript code for a client side dynamic web application. This web application can completely change the text shown and even draw in outside information not in the file. But since it can be put on a CDN as a static asset it is a static web site.

I have to admit after writing this to clarify my thoughts I'm more confused than ever. The situation in which the end user only sees actual HTML in the browser but that HTML was generated without ever being a file on disk is definitely the case of a static HTML web page from the user POV. But it is also the most extreme case of a dynamic web site and everything bad about dynamic sites. Luckily this is the only exception to the rules that spoils the categorization. Maybe it's like the old saying says re: single exceptions.

This post HTML itself was written in gedit, then concatenated with a bunch of other .html files with a single line of shell and redirected to a file on the file system for the webserver to serve and scripts to process. The rss updates are generated by a single call to a perl script I manually type that scans the file system to generate the .rss file for the webserver to serve. Comments on this post will not be noticed by the webserver. But a perl script that tails the webserver access.log file on the file system will see them and then append the comment on to an existing .html file on disk.

Is this page a static HTML page? Yes. Is my site a static web site? I think so. Others would disagree.