Server Side Includes

Here's some examples to the right of a site I built recently with php includes.

Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side scripting language used almost exclusively for the web. As its name implies, its primary use is including the contents of one file into another one dynamically when the latter is served by a web server.

SSI is primarily used to "paste" the contents of one or more files into another.

SSI is another development in web design which, as we're finding, is moving more and more towards saving time and space on both the web design and development sides. A web page can be split into as many small pieces and put together on the server. The server then sends complete HTML to the end user. In order to change the header or footer of every page on a website that can be thousands of pages long, you would only need to change one file and then the server would paste the changed file on every page.

In order for a web server in a default configuration to recognize an SSI-enabled HTML file and therefore carry out these instructions, the file usually must end with the .shtml, .stm or .shtm extension. (It is also possible to configure a web server to process files with extension .html, or really any extension with more modern web servers.)

SSI is most suitable for simple automation tasks; more complex server-side processing is often done with one of the more complex programming languages Perl, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, CFML, Python and Ruby.