server-side include

Server Side Includes (SSI) is an easy server-side scripting language used almost exclusively for the web. As its name implies, its primary use is including the contents of a file into another, via 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, .htm, .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.
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<World-Wide Web> (SSI) The facility provided by most web servers, e.g. NCSA httpd, to replace special tags in an HTML file with the contents of another file before the file is sent out by the server, i.e. an HTML macro.
NCSA httpd tutorial.
(1996-09-08)