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The Basic Uses Of SSI - Server Side Includes

By Sean Burns
2003-10-14

Introduction To SSI - Server Side Includes
SSI stands for Server Side Includes. In it's simple form, it means that you can put a tag in your HTML pages that will be replaced by the file that you specify. This is extremely useful and I strongly urge you, whether you are a beginner or advanced designer, to use it. It will save you many hours work later.

The most popular use is to create header and footer files for your site that will contain all of the information that is pretty much standard across all of your pages. Therefore, you don't need to go through every page on your site to add something or change the design of your site, you just change a couple of files and it's done. We use it across this site - only the text that you are now reading is actually created for this page. Everything to the left, above and below is pulled from two HTML files that contain all of the information that we use on every page. Therefore, if we re-design the site we just change these two files and our whole site is updated immediately - the whole design can change with a few minutes work even if we have 10 000 pages.



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