(OT: wow I just learned the hard way that in Chrome C-k kills the rest of input at point and cannot be undone. Also, C-a goes to the beginning of the input, ra

(OT: wow I just learned the hard way that in Chrome C-k kills the rest of input at point and cannot be undone. Also, C-a goes to the beginning of the input, rather than beginning of the line, so my C-a C-k habit made me lose my typed-up comment twice already.) Answering your second question sheds light on the first. A better term would be "generating" HTML on the server — the browser is obviously in charge of rendering. In Rails for example, you can have ruby code in an ERB template which the framework compiles to HTML. Hence, the HTML is "dynamically" generated (on every request). The opposite of dynamic is "static" where the HTML is either written by hand or generated just once (like Jekyll) rather than on every request. In either case, as a sibling comment mentions, an actual HTML file is served. However, thanks to JavaScript development maturing and JS engines getting faster, a lot of functionality that used to be done mainly server-side can be relegated to the client. I personally wouldn't use the phrase "static client" much, though. (Edit: Problem with "static client". To me a 'static' site means that it has no communication with a database, such as marketing sites or statically-generated blogs. 'Client' is too ambiguous as it's not necessarily a browser. curl is an HTTP client, for instance, and a JavaScript-driven "single-page application" would be pretty limited via curl.)