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Normally, web documents
are sent to the browser of the person who requests them (the
client) as regular text files. HTML tags in the document are
parsed by the browser of the client to format the page.
In order to include
dynamic content in the documents that can change each time the
document is served, a web server can be told to parse, or look
for and execute, commands that are present in the document before
it is sent to the client's browser.
Some of the things
that these commands to the server can do are:
- print the current
date and time or the date and time that the file was last
modified
- include the contents
of a particular file
- execute a cgi
script
Using
Server Side Includes on The Westford Web
The Westford Web
server is configured to parse any document that is named with
the file extension .shtml.
Commands to the server
always conform to the following format:
<!--#command attribute=value-->
Below are some useful
commands that can be included within .shtml documents.
include
The include
command inserts a text file into the parsed file. This can be
a CGI script if the CGI script outputs HTML, such as our counter
script. It can also just be another HTML document. The permissions
on the included file must be set to allow access to the user
requesting it.
The include command
can be used as follows:
<!--#include file="relative/path/from/current/directory/filename.inc"--> or, if in the same directory, <!--#include file="filename.inc"-->
echo
The echo command
prints data from a specific variable. For example, you can print
the date at the time (local time zone) that the document is
loaded. The command looks like this:
<!--#echo var="DATE_LOCAL"-->
(var stands for variable)
and will return the
following output:
Friday, 03-Feb-2012 23:27:31 EST
Other values you
can use for the var attribute include:
- DATE_GMT - same
as DATE_LOCAL but in Greenwich Mean Time
- DOCUMENT_NAME
- name of current document
- LAST_MODIFIED
- date that current file was last modified
as well as any variables
in the CGI Variables set.
fsize
The fsize command
prints the size of a given file. The attributes accepted for fsize
are the sam e as those used for the include command. For
example, to print the file size of this document, I would use
the following command:
<!--#fsize file="ssi.shtml"-->
the output would
look like this:
7.8K
flastmod
flastmod prints
the date that a given file was last modified. The attributes
are the same as those f or include and fsize.
To see when this document was last modified, you would use a
command like thi s:
<!--#flastmod file="ssi.shtml"-->
to get the following
output:
Tuesday, 04-May-2004 11:06:40 EDT
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