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Support
Server Side Includes
What is a
Server-Side Include and do you allow them?
Server side includes (SSI)s applied to an HTML
document, provide for interactive real-time features such as echoing
current time, conditional execution based on logical comparisons,
querying or updating a database, sending an email,
etc., with no programming or CGI scripts. An SSI consists of a special
sequence of characters(tokens) on an HTML page. As the page is sent from
the HTTP server to the requesting client, the page is scanned by the
server for these special tokens. When a token is found the server
interprets the data in the token and performs an action based on the
token data. The format of a SSI token is as follows :
<!--#'<tag><variable set> '--> where :
- <!--# is the opening identifier, a SSI token always starts with
this.
- <tag> is one of the following: echo, include, fsize, flastmod,
exec, config , odbc, email, if, goto, label, break
- <variable set> is a set of one or more variables and their values.
The values allowed here and dependent on the tag and are listed below
each tag listed below. The format of a variable set is as follows :
<variable name> '=' '"' variable data '"' <variable name2> '=' '"'
variable data2 '"' <variable name n> '=' '"' variable datan '"'
- "-->" is the closing identifier, a SSI token always ends with
this.
SSI tokens may contain special tags (subtokens) which are
dereferenced before evaluation of the SSI token takes place. Subtokens
maybe inserted any place in the SSI token. Subtokens are especially
useful when forming if,
odbc,
email, and exec tokens
(described below) that are based on HTML form data returned from a
remote client. The format of a subtoken is as follows: '&&'<subtokendata>'&&'
where:
- '&&' is a reserved character sequence defining the beginning and
end of the subtoken
- <subtokendata> is any value allowed in an echo token.
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Should I use
Server-Side Includes?
Only if necessary! Using Server-Side Includes
requires more than normal system processes and should thus only be used
when necessary. This includes having a Last Modified tag or a
Textcounter on your website.
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How do I
implement Server-Side Includes on my account?
All documents containing at least one Server-Side
Include must have the file extension .shtml. So if you add a SSI to your
index.html page, be sure to rename this file to index.shtml in order for
your SSI to work. Otherwise it is ignored.
Renaming your HTML documents is necessary so the server can parse
through your document, find the SSI(s) and sent the appropriate
information back to the client when these documents are requested.
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What are all of
the supported SSI tags?
The following is a list of all the supported SSI tags
along with a description of each:
|
TAGS |
MEANING |
|
Echo |
provides for inserting
the data of certain variables into an HTML page. |
|
Include |
provides for inserting
the contents of a file into the HTML page at the location of the
include token. |
|
Fsize |
provides for inserting
the size of a given file into the HTML page at the location of the
fsize token. |
|
Flastmod |
provides for inserting
the last modification date of a given file into the HTML page at the
location of the flastmod token. |
|
Exec |
provides for executing
an external executable. |
|
Config |
provides for setting
certain HTML output options. |
|
Odbc |
provides for querying
and updating ODBC databases. |
|
Email |
provides for sending an
email whenever an HTML page is accessed or an HTML form is
submitted. |
|
If |
provides for conditional
execution of SSI operations and conditional printing of HTML text
based on logical comparisons. |
|
Goto |
provides for jumping to
a label token without executing any SSI code or printing* any HTML
text between the goto token and label token. |
|
Label |
provides a place for a
goto or if goto token to jump to. |
|
Break |
provides for termination
of HTML documents at any point. |
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