Web Development with Node and Express, 2nd Edition

Chapter 17. Static Content

Static content refers to the resources your app will be serving that don’t change on a per-request basis. Here are the usual suspects:

Multimedia

Images, videos, and audio files. It’s quite possible to generate image files on the fly, of course (and video and audio, though that’s far less common), but most multimedia resources are static.

HTML

If our web application is using views to render dynamic HTML, it wouldn’t generally qualify as static HTML (though for performance reasons, you may dynamically generate HTML, cache it, and serve it as a static resource). SPA applications, as we’ve seen, commonly send a single, static HTML file to the client, which is the most common reason to treat HTML as a static resource. Note that requiring the client to use an .html extension is not very modern, so most servers now allow static HTML resources to be served without the extension (so /foo and /foo.html would return the same content).

CSS

Even if you use an abstracted CSS language like LESS, Sass, or Stylus, at the end of the day, your browser needs plain CSS, which is a static resource.¹

JavaScript

Just because the server is running JavaScript doesn’t mean there won’t be client-side JavaScript. Client-side JavaScript is considered a static resource. Of course, now the line is starting to get a bit hazy: what if there was common code that we wanted to use on the backend and client side? There are ways to solve this problem, but at the end of the day, the ...