SSI and ESI
If you followed the introductory chapter carefully, then you will know that SSI and its successor, ESI, were invented to replace the client-side mechanism framesets with a server-side counterpart. There have been multiple reasons for this:
- Framesets required more requests
- Framesets could not take advantage of the parent’s base styling or structure
- Framesets in general make the website inconsistent
Naturally, the first thing that changed was the <frameset> element. Since the first impression was to keep this addition hidden on the client in case the backend did not process it properly, another mechanism had to be chosen.
A special comment was born:
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Some web servers require a special kind of file extension for static files, while others require a configuration for SSI to be active.
SSI
The common SSI directives that are supported by pretty much all web servers –...
