Server-Side Includes

When you're designing a Web page, often most of the content on the page is static. Occasionally, portions of the page are changed, but overall the page stays the same. Consider a Web page that displays a current stock price for a company. The vast majority of the page is probably static—navigation bars, pictures, logos, usage information, headers, footers, titles, and so on. The important part of the page—the stock price—is generated by reading a database somewhere and simply filling in the blank.

To help create such pages, most Web servers support a feature called server-side includes (SSI)— also called server-parsed HTML. This feature allows the author of the Web site to construct an HTML Web page that's basically static ...

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