SSI usefulness (was RE: OBJECT, inheritance, and rendering)

At 4:22p -0700 08/05/98, Mike Meyer wrote:
>> Umm, could someone explain the advantage of a CSI over a SSI?
>
>CSI takes advantage of caches. SSI pretty much defeats them, though
>some implementations manage to do a bit better, and datestamp the
>document with the date of the latest part used to build it.

I don't really understand caches and proxies, but isn't it *their*
responsibility to work with what a server generates? Or is the problem
that some header is missing?

>CSI also
>lets you build documents from pieces on different servers - allowing
>you to imbed a search result from the HTTP interface to an SQL server
>in a document that comes from a off-the-shelf HTTP server.

Heh, I'd like to see how you'd ensure the integrity of that document's
HTML structure. ;)  Sounds to me like a recipe for browser-crashing.

>> I cannot think of a single application for a client-side include.
>
>There aren't very many *usefull* things to do with SSI. Eliminate
>things that are better done with a server-side build model and there's
>very little left.

CNET does everything with SSIs, and probably wouldn't be able to do what
they do otherwise. We also use it at SLAC so that anyone here can include
the list of current announcements on their pages. I will also be using it
on my own site to generate a pseudo-random quote (see my test page at
<http://www.natural-innovations.com/testcgi.html> -- reload it a few times).


>See <URL: http://www.phone.net/home/mwm/no-ssi.html> for more information.

I read it, and I disagree. Or are you just saying that a page which would
otherwise contain an SSI should instead be replaced with a Perl script
that assembles the page and then passes it on to the server? I hope you're
not saying that pages should never be generated on the fly...


-Walter
____________________________________________________________________________
  Walter Ian Kaye <boo@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>        Menlo Park, CA
  Perl on Unix, AppleScript on MacOS, at the nation's first WWW server.
  http://www.slac.stanford.edu/grp/techpubs/people/walter.html

Received on Wednesday, 5 August 1998 19:43:13 UTC