Server-Side Includes

What are Server-Side Includes?

Server-parsed HTML, also known as Server-Side Includes, allows web developers to specify actions to be performed on HTML (web) documents before they are visible to someone viewing the page with a web browser. Common actions include executing a program the results of which appear in the HTML document, inserting the contents of a file in an HTML document, and inserting the values of operating system environment variables in an HTML document.

Server-parsed HTML syntax is described in the Apache Server-Side Includes documentation.

What server-side includes options are available?

Apache on our server supports the following forms of server-side includes:

• .shtml files: All files with the extension .shtml will support server-side includes.

Setting up standard headers/footers

If you have a standard footer that you would like to include on all your web pages, you would upload the file footer.html to the same directory as the rest of your content. Then, each file in which you wanted to include the footer, would need to be named with file exension .shtml instead of .html, and would need to incorporate the following line where the footer file should be included:

<!--#include virtual="footer.html"-->

Note: using the file extension of .inc will not work by default on our servers. If you need to use files with .inc extension see this information about adding an .htaccess file to your site.

Will server-side image maps work?

Yes. You may store the image and its associated map file in your own directories. The server then processes the map file as part of the normal html document parsing performed.