How to call a menu in a page from an external (html or txt) file?

[Joost]

Managing a fast growing website I want to manage the menubar (APPLET) in a single html or text file for easy updating. When any page (content) is called by a browser it should insert the previous mentioned APLLET in predefined table.

Is this possible? (I don not want to use frames).

[tedster]

Hello Joost, and welcome to the Forums at Webmaster World.

Sounds to me like you could use a server side include (SSI). Here's two previous threads on the subject:

[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

You might also want to use the "site search" link at the top of the page for more info -- there's been a lot of conversation here about SSI. Let us know if this does the trick for you.

[Joost]

I'am not familiar with server side include (SSI)so I have to study this item first. If it works I'll sure let you now by replying to this posting!

[rcjordan]

Joost, I do exactly what you're describing by using external javascript to write the menues; 1 global, numerous regional ones. There are some negatives, mainly the lack of spidering and the fact that between 5 and 10 percent of your visitors may have javascript turned off, but it's served me very well for about 2 years now. I was planning to switch entirely to SSI, but I'm now giving IFRAME a hard look, at least for part of the content injection.

[Joost]

Hello Tedster,

Thanks for your reply to use SSI to reach my goal. It was a good suggestion! In beta-testing I have pages running retreving the menu from a txt-file. So far no problems. Because of the type of webserver my ISP usses (WN) some handcoding on webserver files still is necessary :(