Why Use SSI?
Okay, you have your standard website, with an index page and perhaps a dozen subpages. Your site has a set of elements on every page (banner logo at the top, navigation bar on the side, and more navigation elements in a footer at the bottom.) Each page has its unique content. Each page also has elements that appear on every page, and thus these elements are “universal elements.” When you add a new universal element (or modify a universal element,) you have to change it on all pages. Let’s say that you add a copyright page. So now you have to open all twelve pages and add a copyright link to the footer of all twelve pages. Next week, you decide to change the copyright year. This means that you will reopen all twelve pages and make the change. It’s okay to do it manually; twelve pages isn’t that much. You can do this in maybe twenty minutes. But your site will grow. Pretty soon, you’ll have 200 pages. Any small corporate site will have several hundred pages. Large corporations will have
