Simple SHTML Tutorial

SHTML is simply a way to combine more than one HTML files into one. But how can that be done? And how is that useful?

SHTML will save you time and will give your site dynamic capabilities, because changing one HTML file will affect all your web site pages that are built using SHTML file.

Maybe you are confused now, and don't know what all this means, but after you finish reading, you will understand what it means.

Before you use SHTML files you should check if you host provide you with SSI (server side includes) if it is provided it should be enabled.

Let's assume that every web page you have is divided into 3 parts header, body and footer. In all the pages you have the header and footer is the same, so its not wise to write them every time you make a web page, and if you want to change something in the header for example your should edit all the html files one by one. Here comes the SHTML strength, what you should do is make three HTML files called for example header.html and footer.html, these two will not change and a third one (which is the body) will change according to the content of each page.

Now to make a page called "test" for example we do the following:

In a text editor we include header.html, test.html and then footer.html, using SHTML syntax

You can divide the file into as many files as you need and you can divide it at any part you wish like making the navigation buttons in one file.