Server Side Includes
Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple interpreted server-side scripting language used almost exclusively for the Web.
The most frequent use of SSI is to include the contents of one or more files into a web page on a web server. For example, a web page containing a daily quotation could include the quotation by placing the following code into the file of the web page:
With one change of the quote.txt
file, all pages that include the file will display the latest daily quotation. The inclusion is not limited to files, and may also be the text output from a program, or the value of a system variable such as the current time.
Server Side Includes are useful for including a common piece of code throughout a site, such as a page header, a page footer and a navigation menu. Conditional navigation menus can be conditionally included using control directives.
In order for a web server to recognize an SSI-enabled HTML file and therefore carry out these instructions, either the filename should end with a special extension, by default .shtml
, .stm
, .shtm
, or, if the server is configured to allow this, set the execution bit of the file.