Jetgirl - 5:10 am on Jan 1, 2008 (gmt 0)

I text/hand edit my sites, and have been looking to make some smart changes that will allow me to centralize site navigation should the day come I need to change my global navigation links (aka change site navigation link order, or add/hide navigation links, etc.). Server side includes seem to be the way to go based on all my research - I have even tested it out and made sure it will work on my server.

My question is based on the way I currently display contextual awareness of location on the site in the navigational structure. I have been using CSS to have an additional style that is triggered by a class or id tag that is flagged for the page the user is on. I don't want to have an SSI page for every page on my site (the goal here is to simplify!), so the only way I can currently think of keeping this feature is to have a duplicate HTML call for the tag that needs to be called as active still reside in the native page HTML.

I believe that even with this duplicity, if a global navigation change is made, the number of actual HTML pages touched would be greatly reduced, but I'm just trying to think as much ahead as I can before I roll out any big changes (including the implementation of SSI).

Generic Example:

SSI would call
<a class="location1" href="example.com/subdirectory1">Subdirectory1</a>
<a class="location2" href="example.com/subdirectory2">Subdirectory2</a>

but HTML would recall
<a id="current" class="location1" href="example.com/subdirectory1">Subdirectory1</a>

thus the navigation as seen by a bot would be
<a class="location1" href="example.com/subdirectory1">Subdirectory1</a>
<a class="location2" href="example.com/subdirectory2">Subdirectory2</a>
<a id="current" class="location1" href="example.com/subdirectory1">Subdirectory1</a>

So, I guess I have 2 questions about this:
1) Would the search bots be upset to see this kind of duplicity in the HTML (which is all they will see), and
2) Is there something clever that I'm missing that would help provide contextual awareness in a more meaningful and less repeatitive manner?