There are times when you will have certain information that you repeat in numerous documents on the server, like your signature, or a thank-you note. In cases like this, it's efficient to have that information stored in a file, and insert that file into your various HTML documents with the SSI include command. Suppose you have a signature file like the following stored in address.html:
<HR> <ADDRESS> <PRE> Shishir Gundavaram WWW Software, Inc. White Street 90 Sherman Street Boston, Massachusetts 02115 Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140 shishir@bu.edu The address information was last modified Friday, 22-Dec-95 12:43:00 EST. </PRE> </ADDRESS>
You can include the contents of this file in any other HTML document with the following command:
<!--#include file="address.html"-->
This will include address.html located in the current directory into another document. You can also use the virtual parameter with the include command to insert a file from a directory relative to the server root:
<!--#include virtual="/public/address.html"-->
For our final example, let's include a boilerplate file that contains embedded SSI directives. Here is the address file (address.shtml) with an embedded echo command (note the .shtml extension):
<HR> <ADDRESS> <PRE> Shishir Gundavaram WWW Software, Inc. White Street 90 Sherman Street Boston, Massachusetts 02115 Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140 shishir@bu.edu The address information was last modified on <!--#echo var="LAST_MODIFIED"-->. </PRE> </ADDRESS>
When you include this address file into an HTML document, it will contain your signature along with the date the file was last modified.