SSI

Dynamic pages are obviously useful for CGI programs that return some output based on some input, perhaps submitted by a user via a form. For example, in a database search, the CGI program will need to construct the HTML page as it finds items in the database. However, writing a CGI program for every dynamic document can be a waste. For example, if you wanted the current date displayed on every HTML document on your server, one way would be to write a CGI program for every document on the server. This i's not a practical solution.

Servers that will preparse (parsing is done usually for files named with extension .html that differs server to server) HTML documents for special tags have a feature called server side includes (or SSI for short). Implementations of SSI vary among different servers, but the idea is the same. The server will normally reserve a few special commands, usually surrounded by the HTML comment tag .

When the server accesses a document, it will parse it for these tags or serverside includes.

Upon reading one of these server side include tags, the server will replace it with the appropriate text. This could be anything from the output of a CGI program to another HTML document.

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