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 at PRIMUS PRIMUS' web servers are configured to
parse any documents that are 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
sc ript outputs HTML. 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 in one of two ways: <!--#include virtual="/path/to/file/to/be/included.html"-->
or <!--#include file="relative/path/from/current/directory"--> 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: Wednesday, 20-Aug-2008 10:10:15 EDT
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
- DOCUMENT_URI - virtual path to 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.html"--> the output would look like this: 5k
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.html"--> to get the following
output: Thursday, 31-Oct-2002 13:52:10 EST
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