HTML Include file

Question

I have a basic web application packaged as an EAR deployed on GlassFish. The web module has some html files. The html files have a common footer, an html file, that I would like to extract out and make an include. When I do, and put:

<!--#include virtual="insertthisfile.html" -->

in an html file, it does not work. Should this work?

Answer 1

This is a technique called Server-Side Includes (SSI). It may not be enabled on your web host. If it is, sometimes they force a .shtml extension to be required for included files, so try renaming your file insertthisfile.shtml.

If that doesn't work, you might be able to enable SSIs in a .htaccess file (assuming your web server is Apache). You can find instructions on how to do this by googling. There's a decent set here.

If that fails, I would contact your web host and see if they have SSIs enabled.

Answer 2

Should this work? Perhaps, at some special settings, with some experienced programmer, this could be useful. In my case the include statement seems to be ignored.

I could include some text with

(embed src="include.shtml")
(/embed)

Above, I type () instead of angular brackets.

With the "embed", the setting in the header of the page does not apply to the included text; it should be repeated again, and, by default, the result is ugly. It looks strange, as if the designers of the html did not build-in the very basic tool, the include command. For short articles, the include could save an order of magnitude in the size of files.