Skip to Content
Webmaster in a Nutshell, Second Edition
book

Webmaster in a Nutshell, Second Edition

by Stephen Spainhour, Robert Eckstein
June 1999
Intermediate to advanced
540 pages
21h 39m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Webmaster in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Chapter 13. Server Side Includes

Server Side Includes (SSI) are directives you can place into an HTML document to execute other programs or to output data, such as file statistics or the contents of environment variables. SSI directives can save you the trouble of writing complete CGI programs to output documents containing a small amount of dynamic information. While Server Side Includes are not technically CGI, they can become an important tool for incorporating CGI-like information as well as output from CGI programs.

Keep in mind, however, that not all servers support these directives. In addition, some servers allows the setting of server-side variables, which can be used in Extended Server Side Includes (XSSI) conditional expressions. These expressions determine which portion of a server document should be displayed.

When a client requests a document from an SSI-enabled server and the document is coded appropriately, the server parses the specified document looking for SSI directives. We’ve already considered the advantages to this system; there are also a couple of liabilities. First, parsing documents before sending them to the client represents additional server overhead. Second, enabling SSI can create a security risk. For example, an unwise user might embed directives to execute system commands that output confidential information. In short, SSI can be very handy, but it must be used cautiously and efficiently.

This chapter summarizes the Server Side Includes, as ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Webmaster in a Nutshell, Third Edition

Webmaster in a Nutshell, Third Edition

Robert Eckstein, Stephen Spainhour
Back-end Performance

Back-end Performance

Bruno Skvorc, Christopher Pitt, Tonino Jankov, Reza Lavaryan, Daniel Berman

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565923251Purchase bookErrata Page