Dynamic HTML

Dynamic HTML is a technique of creating web page interaction and design elements by using a combination of the static markup language like HTML, JavaScript, CSS and/or the Document Object Model.

SHTML

Web pages that contain SSIs often end with an shtml extension, though this is not a requirement. The filename extension enables the Web server to differentiate those pages that need to be processed before they are sent to the browser.


Server Side Includes (SSI)

Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side scripting language used almost exclusively for the web. As its name implies, its primary use is including the contents of one file into another one dynamically when the latter is served by a web server.

SSI is primarily used to "paste" the contents of one or more files into another. For example, a file (of any type, .html, .txt, etc.) containing a daily quote could be included into multiple SSI-enabled pages throughout a website by placing the following code into the desired pages:



With one change of the quote.txt file, pages including the snippet will display the latest daily quote. Server Side Includes are useful for including a common piece of code throughout a site, such as a navigation menu.

In order for a web server in a default configuration to recognize an SSI-enabled HTML file and therefore carry out these instructions, the file must end with the .shtml or .shtm extension. (It is also possible to configure a web server to process files with extension .html.)

SSI is most suitable for simple automatization tasks; more complex server-side processing is often done with one of the more complex programming languages Perl, PHP, ASP, JSP, CFML, Python and Ruby.