Websites and web applications?

Question

(From the point of view of a user, not how it's built or which option is selected in Visual Studio)

...What is the difference between a "website" and a "web application"?

Is there a difference?

Are there characteristics that characterise the two?

Answer 1

Software applications are software tools designed to help the user perform specific tasks. Web applications simply provide a software application through a web interface. Think Google Docs as a typical example, but web applications can be much simpler.

On the other hand, a website can be regarded as just a collection of related digital assets (documents, images, videos, etc), relative to a common URL.

Answer 2

(Note: I take the definition of a website from Wikipedia and deduce a definition of web applications from that (or, better, define differences between the two concepts). Everything in bold face is meant, put together, to build the definition of a web application.)

Starting with the fundamentals: Is a web application a subset of a website? Following Wikipedia's definition of a website, that Daniel Vassallo has layed out in his answer, a website is a bunch of documents under a common URL. This also follows the definition in the Cambridge dictionary.

A web application, on the other hand, is a bunch of web-based dynamic HTML and JS documents, together with images, CSS files and other documents, that is most probably, but not exclusively located under a single URL. The purpose of a web application comes below.

Hence we can state: If a web application is located on a single server only, without using client-side cross-domain techniques or extensive local storage (which I'd like to define here as everything beyond standard cookies and default caching), it is also a website.

Corollary: There can be web applications, that are not websites.

Hence we have to extend the definition of web application: A web application, under certain circumstances being a website, is a set of interactive documents. Interactive thereby means, that the user can do more than just follow hyperlinks to get from resource to resource. She can actively and in a well-defined manner change the state of resources. The web application is, for this task, not confined to a single server, or to the server side at all.

Now we yet have to define, where a web application ends and quite anything else starts. Therefore we state: A web application has always an entry point, that is located at a website. If it has multiple entry points, they must all together be part of the same website.

qed

I am open for any suggestion on how this epic piece of wisdom could be refined to meet the requirements of reality. ;-)

Clarification: This answer is in no way disrespectful to the question. However, I took a semi-serious approach, by which I mean, that the provided definition may or may not fit into one's personal idea of what a web application is compared to a website, but (and that is the serious part) is based on and deduced from a (possibly random) collection of facts.

Clarification 2: This answer has nothing to do with Visual Studio.