Basic Principles of Web Page Generation
Problem
You want to produce a web page from a script rather than by writing it manually.
Solution
Write a program that generates the page when it executes. This gives you more control over what is sent to the client than when you write a static page, although it may also require that you provide more parts of the response. For example, it may be necessary to write the headers that precede the page body.
Discussion
HTML is a markup language—that’s what the “ML” stands for. HTML consists of a mix of plain text to be displayed and special markup indicators or constructs that control how the plain text is displayed. Here is a very simple HTML page that specifies a title in the page header, and a body with a white background containing a single paragraph:
<html> <head> <title>Web Page Title</title> </head> <body bgcolor="white"> <p>Web page body.</p> </body> </html>
It’s possible to write a script that produces that same page,
but doing so differs in some ways from writing a static page. For one
thing, you’re writing in two languages at once. (The script is written
in your programming language, and the script itself writes HTML.)
Another difference is that you may have to produce more of the
response that is sent to the client. When a web server sends a static
page to a client, it actually sends a set of one or more header lines
first that provide additional information about the page. For example,
an HTML document is preceded by a Content-Type: header ...
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