Re: seperate doc nav-bar?

Noah:

I think what you are looking for is SSI, (Server Side Includes).
This is simply a file that you call very much like an image.
Depending on the server, the tag would look something like this:

 <!--#include="linksfile.txt"-->

Note that the file extension, .txt could be almost anything.
.htm , .inc , etc.

You do have to watch the path to the file just as you would an
image. Some servers require that you insert the word "virtual"
after "#include", depending on the path to the file you are going
to include.

Also, some server administrators require that you rename the page
containing the tag to include another file as "whatever.shtml"
The reason they give is that the server must be told which files
it must parse, (scan) to look for include commands. As this takes
time, they don't want to slow their server down looking at ALL
the files called. (Others claim this "extra time" required is
more in the minds of the administrator than the server
itself.--Don't ask me??)

The problem is that FrontPage, Drumbeat, Dreamweaver and good old
Notepad, (among many others) will not do a Save As in .shtml This
means one would have to rename all those files.

The "generally" accepted practice is now to save regular files as
.htm and files containing include files as .html. As most
programs will save in either format, this works out great and
still saves all those server from having to parse .htm files.

This is even more meaningful when one remembers that many of the
"automatic" programs will not publish a .shtml file and if you
use an FTP program to publish, (up load) the files you mess up
FrontPage extensions and many of the others.

I have one local ISP that insists on .shtml and thus far, I have
had no choice but to send eight FP clients elsewhere for hosting.
It seems silly when their servers could be programmed to parse
anything they wanted it to.

I mention all this as it was the one thing that confounded our
early attempts at SSI. After weeks of occasional fooling with it,
we finally learned of this from another source. (Our ISP had said
"use anything") When asked about it the ISP Guru then had to
"look into the matter". He then came back and said "everybody"
uses .shtml.

You've heard of Road Rage--How about ISP Rage ??? Oh-Well (Sigh)

Ted Temer
Temercraft Designs Redding, CA
temer(at)c-zone.net
http://www.temercraft.com




>BTW, thanks everyone for the CSS info.
>The idea of having stylesheet info in a seperate document made
me wonder if
>it would be possible to do so with other things?  For instance,
could you
>have a set of image links (to navigate your site) in a seperate
file, and put
>a link to that file whenever you want a navigation bar?  That
way if you
>needed to change the layout of the site, you wouldn't have to go
through and
>change every page...
>Lemme know if it's possible..
>
>-Noah
>

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