i have a website which contains many news articles. IN the database, each article has so-called “tags” which the user sees displayed alongside the article. When the user clicks on the tag, they are directed to a list of other articles also containing this tag.
Should I generate a distinct HTML page for each newly created tag, or should I create one single page and vary the content based on what tag the user clicked on using session variables????
obviously, the pages will not be completely static since I will update them everytime a new article with a matching tag is uploaded
You certainly shouldn’t use session data. That is for data that needs to persist, but it set on a per user basis. Using it for per-request data will just break bookmarking and introduce race conditions.
You should have a distinct URI for each tag. It doesn’t matter (from an end user perspective) if you use dynamically generated content (either via a query string, or parsing the URI in your server side code (most frameworks, e.g. Dancer, will handle this for you)) or if you use generated static pages.
Static pages make it easier to handle caching and give better performance on very high traffic systems, but tend to require a rebuild of large sections of the site if content changes. You can get similar performance improvements by using server side caching (e.g. via memcached).
Dynamic pages are usually simpler to implement.