Web Design in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Adding SSI Commands to a Document

Server Side Include commands have the following format:

<!--#element attribute="value" -->

The element is one of the predefined functions that Server Side Includes can perform, such as include or echo (we’ll talk more about specific elements later).

The command also includes one or more attribute/value pairs that provide the specific parameters to the function.

There are a few important things to note about SSI command syntax:

• The whole command must be enclosed in comment indicators (<!-- ... -->).

• The comment terminator (-->) must be preceded by a space to make it clear it is not part of the SSI information.

• The whole command must be kept on one line (line breaks between the comment tags may cause the SSI not to function).

• The # symbol is an important part of the command and must not be omitted.

Example: Virtual Includes

The simplest type of Server Side Include is a " virtual include,” which tells the server to add information to a file before sending it to the browser.

In this example, let’s take a page from within a web site that uses a standard navigational toolbar held together with a table. Instead of placing the table in the HTML source for every web page in the site, we can just insert it into each document as follows:

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>News</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<!--#include virtual="navtable.html" -->
<H1>Today's Headlines</H1>
...page contents...
</BODY>
</HTML>

Documents that contain SSI commands should be saved with an identifying suffix, ...