> and recommend to anyone who asks to do the same because it is notoriously
> unreliable and regularly crashes things due to incompatibilities. But that
> doesn't mean that it isn't a viable solution/band-aid for someone who
> needs it.


So in on breath you tell everyone to turn JS off and in another you champion
its use???  I won't ask you how you feel about politics.  ;-}

We provide answers here, yes, but the answers should also be varied.  Under
ideal circumstances there are often several possible answers provided and
the ensuing discussions that occur here provides both knowledge and choice.
Is that a bad thing?

I fail to understand why so many people get locked into the idea that there
is only one answer and theirs is the only correct one.  An open mind accepts
change.  A closed one rejects it.  This business by nature changes faster
than Moore's Law. ( a new generation of personal computer every 18 months )


I use JS a great deal.  It is a very useful client side scripting language,
but tt does have its limits. Using it, for example, as the sole source for a
menu system would be catastrophic.  By your own example you wouldn't see the
JS menus.  What good is that?  I stand by my original recommendation.  SSI
is the best choice.

Alternates to JavaScript are SSI or PHP.  Since SSI is simpler to impliment,
it makes a better choice.  I have found that with PHP there are many
versions and often this creates problems with canned scripts, besides the
PHP scripts I have seen for this are very complex..

SSI works well under Apache and IIS style servers.  I have used it on both
systems and found the default mode for SSI is usually "on" or it is easily
turned on at the webmaster's control panel.

The only thing bad about SSI is that I didn't discover it years ago.  I have
several very large websites and SSI would have saved me a lot of work over
the years.  I found SSI very easy to impliment.  Since it is a server side
program, you either test it online or like I do, offline with Dreamweaver.

Paul Wilson
webguroo(at)tampabay.rr.com


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