Python: Essential Reference

23. Web Programming

Python is widely used when building websites and serves several different roles in this capacity. First, Python scripts are often a useful way to simply generate a set of static HTML pages to be delivered by a web server. For example, a script can be used to take raw content and decorate it with additional features that you typically see on a website (navigation bars, sidebars, advertisements, stylesheets, etc.). This is mainly just a matter of file handling and text processing—topics that have been covered in other sections of the book.

Second, Python scripts are used to generate dynamic content. For example, a website might operate using a standard webserver such as Apache but would use Python scripts to dynamically handle ...