Django Unleashed

1.3 Understanding Modern Websites

HTTP is a stateless protocol: it doesn’t know who you are or where you’ve been. It knows only what you’ve just asked it for. In the early days of the Internet, each webpage on a site was a file, such as a text file or a PDF. Websites were static.

Today, many websites are dynamic. We now interact with websites: instead of just asking the server to send us a file, we write comments on videos, blog about the best web framework ever, and tweet cat pictures to our friends. To enable these activities, webpages must be generated (computed) for each user based on new and changing data. We’ve had to add a number of technologies on top of HTTP to determine state (such as sessions, which we’ll see in Chapter 19: Basic ...