A static site cannot inspect headers. There is no HTML, or even JavaScript function you can put in a file to inspect the headers before the file is sent to the client.
A static site is a collection of static files. It doesn't need a server, you could just open it locally (in browsers that don't block file:// URI schemes). If you need some special configuration of the server, it is no longer a static site. The server is dynamically selecting which content is served.
Oh, difference in definitions. You mean "non-configurable web server." Because you could definitely use a static site generator to create multiple versions of the site data and then configure your web server to select which data is emitted.
But agreed; if your web server is just reflecting the filesystem, add this to the pile of "things that are hard with that kind of web server." But perhaps worth noting: even Apache and Python's http.server can select the file to emit based on the Accept header.
A static site is one that you can serve through static hosting, where you have no control over the web server or its configuration. There is not some extra thing which is a static site with dynamic content. “Static” means “doesn't change.” The document served doesn't change subject to the person receiving it. You are talking about a solution that is dynamic. That does change based on who is making the request.
>you could definitely use a static site generator to create multiple versions of the site data and then configure your web server to select which data is emitted
And this web-server configuration would not exist within the static site. The static site generator could not output it, therefore it is not a part of the static site. It is not contained within the files output by the static site generator. It is additional dynamic content added by the web server.
It breaks the fundamental aspect of a static site, that it can be deployed simply to any service without change to the content. Just upload a zip file, and you are done.
I get your meaning; I've just heard "static site" used to refer to a site where the content isn't dynamically computed at runtime, not a site where the server is doing a near-direct-mapping from the filesystem to the HTTP output.
> Just upload a zip file, and you are done.
This is actually how I serve my static sites via Dreamhost. The zipfile includes the content negotiation rules in the `.htaccess` file.
(Perhaps worth remembering: even the rule "the HTTP responses are generated by looking up a file matching the path in the URL and echoing that file as the body of the GET response" is still a per-server rule; there's no aspect of the HTTP spec that declares "The filesystem is directly mirrored to web access" is a thing. It's rather a protocol used by many simple web servers, and most of them allow overrides to do something slightly more complicated while being one step away from "this is just the identity function on whatever is in your filesystem, well, not technically the identity function because unless someone did something very naughty, I don't serve anything for http://example.com/../uhoh-now-i-am-in-your-user-directory").
