DigitalNuance Online Support Manual
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Server Side Includes (SSI)

SSI = Server Side Includes:

Server - This refers to our servers (computer where these web pages are stored).
Side - This means all actions occur on our side, i.e., JavaScripts are (client side) commands that make your web browser do something. Server Side commands, on the other hand, occur within a program on our server not your browser.
Includes - This means that whatever action is taken by our server, it's output is included in the html document at whatever location the command is placed.

The simplest example of server-parsed HTML is to have a file "test.shtml" containing this text:

Line one
<!--#exec cgi="mycgi.cgi" --><P>
Line three

And then have a file "mycgi.cgi" that contains, on Unix:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Content-type: text/htmlnn";
print "Line Two";


And when you access "test.shtml", it will output:

Line one
Line two
Line three


If your include directive is <!--#exec cgi="..." -->, then the cgi program you run must output a standard CGI header (Content-type: text/html)


Any file named test.shtml will be parsed automatically by Apache on our servers.
Do not put any spaces before the '#' character in your include directives; if you have "<!-- #exec" instead of
"<!--#exec", the line will be ignored.

Server-side includes in "custom trailers" will not work, since custom trailers are appended to the output of your web pages after all other processing has been done on them. Any server-side includes that you put into your custom trailers will be sent directly to the browser without being parsed.

More Help for using SSI can be found at:
http://www.carleton.ca/~dmcfet/html/ssi.html
http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/tutorials/includes.html
http://bignosebird.com/ssi.shtml
http://www.ora.com/info/cgi/ch05.html
http://usats.com/learn/ssi.shtml

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