Forum Moderators: phranque
Your are asking a very broad question. I find ssi very helpful for parts of your site like headers as every page calls the same file and it can speed up your site by caching the page and makes changes easier. There are drawbacks though.
I'm not 100% if this is accurate, but you may get better feedback here [webmasterworld.com...] ..... which is more the cup of tea regarding SSI
Overall, SSI is good for including repetitive information like mandatory HTML, including your top "header", navigation, and bottom "footer. You will no doubt have noticed that 99% of sites have a graphical theme, which uses the same code over and over. If you use ssi, you can call one file for a certain part of the page, so that any one change to this file changes the site overall if you use it as a SSI.
Definetely read up, its worth getting lots of feedback on :)
/edited for bad grammar (as usual)
Richard3
[edited by: brotherhood_of_LAN at 3:12 pm (utc) on June 4, 2002]
how is this? ssi are processed/included by the server, the browser doesn't know any different.
ssi certainly make updating a site easier though
The thing I am worried about is slowing down loading times of my pages! I think I am going to go ahead with them cause they are so handy for updating.
T
My particular server was delivering the pages significantly slower when I inserted SSI. The server was a FreeBSD/Unix Apache v1.2. I used the AddHandler method, which was the only way to do it with their config.
I chose to keep the redundant headers, footers etc, but to use external JavaScript document.writeln instead. Some designers here are against using JS in such a prevalent way but I compared browser support and JS won hands down. I figure, those users who have JS disabled know how/when to enable it again and of course I do not rely upon this method to post links that I want seen by robots.
I wouldn't worry about that too much. When electronic messages travel at the speed of light, not much can slow down a way something is processed on the server and requested by the browser :)
Since its all done server side, itll never appear slower downloading, only fractions of a second would be involved. In any event, you would have to be serving an appreciable number of page views for this factor to come into account IMO, that is, IF there is any slow down :)
One of the reason I use includes is to include the DTD, <html> <head> charset etc all at the top of the page, all in one line. I can just include this in any future page I make, without having to worry about missing the mandatory HTML. To add to the fact, Its all squeezed into one line, saving a little space. I guess this space saving also cancels out the above issue ....
I'm no SSI guru, but it seems obvious its benefits outweigh any possible disadvantages
Nested includes are a very good way to slow down pages. As long as your included files don't include files that include files it should be no problem.
I had to rewrite a 1000 pg site once because they had slowed it to a crawl with nested includes.
not something I recommend for a good time. I agree with Brotherhood, in my experience
>>its benefits outweigh any possible disadvantages
BOL, well that was the case with my server. Several million domains, all running SSI... you get the picture :)
I used XSL and XML in my sites. I have a clever piece of code (written by me in vb.net) which allows the clients browser to cache the page in parts. This means when they request the page it only brings back the main part of the page and get's the rest of the page (header, footer, nav etc... from the cache). I originally thought this would bring problems of people not seeing my site properly when I update it, however, this was overcome by clearing the cache when a new session starts.
Cool. ;)
