Linking external HTML pages

moving the menu bar to a central location

[Jenphi]

I'm designing a site for a client of mine, and have run into a dilemma. They want to have a drop-down menu bar, fine. They may want to change it later, not fine. I don't feel like changing 50+ pages individually to reflect the new menu options. So, to save my sanity, is there any way to link an external HTML page (much like you do with css)? I've tried to modify the link tag, but to no avail.

Help?

[Marcia]

>any way to link an external HTML page (much like you do with css)?

Absolutely, and welcome to the board, Jennphi.

It's actually a .txt file, and you link to it using SSI - Server Side Includes. That will put the menu with links or whatever else you want onto every page you insert the tag on.

[T Suresh Babu]

You can use (menu)js files created by you are obtained freely from web.

Once change the menu attributes, menu fields any time as your customer wishes.

As Marcia says - You can use SSI (Server Side Includes) if your site dynamic site.

[keyplyr]

The way I do it is, I create a .js file containing the entire dropdown menu JavaScript (including all the page links.) Here are some menu scripts to choose from:

[simplythebest.net...]

Then I link to this file from my page mark-up. Here is a site that walks you through setting this up:

[web-source.net...]

This works very well and doesn't slow the page load like SSI does. Of course a small percentage of users may have JavaScript disabled, but they wouldn't be able to see a JS menu anyway in that case.

Note: Not a great idea to have your insite navigation soley with JavaScript - at least not from the very first page. Most Search Engine spiders cannot follow links in a JavaScript.

[Jenphi]

Those are all great ideas, and I've tried the external .js file as well. I think the problem might be is that I'm calling a java applet within this code and some of the lines already have a "document.write" in front of them, like this:

document.write('<applet Code="apPopupMenu" Archive="apPopupMenu.jar" Width = "699" Height = "17" MAYSCRIPT>')

Even more annoyingly, the code I want included works just fine by itself in a separate html page.

But! The SSI worked (when I actually ran it on a SERVER and not my win98 box :) ) Thank you.