I'm preparing to build a website for my wife's small business - I have a solid background in (x)html and am learning the in's and out's of CSS. But one thing I can't seem to find is a way to "embed" a portion of the page (if embed is even the correct word).

She is going to have several dozen pages as part of her site - but the left column (containing the links) will remain basically the same for each page. What I'd like to do is create that column as a separate .html document, and have each page "point" to it to fill in the space. This way, if I did ever need to change a link, I can do it once, and not have to go to each of the several dozen pages individually (think: frames).

A) Does this make sense? B) Can it be done using CSS?

Marcus

Hello and welcome. :)

A) Yes.
B) No.

CSS is for styling existing content, not for providing the content. What you want is SSI (Server Side Includes). SSI isn't a real programming language, it's more of a limited set of directives that can be used to include files or variables. The same thing can be done with real programming languages like PHP.

It's very easy. You can think of it like cutting out pieces of the page with a pair of siccors. You can cut wherever you want. Save the cutouts to their own files. Then you insert special comments where you want the pieces pasted back. The server parses the HTML, looking for those comments, and inserts the corresponding files before the page is sent to the browser. And the page is whole again! :D


                                    ^^^^^
(note the space before the closing "-->")

You must also tell the server to parse the pages for SSI. Usually by renaming the pages .shtml, but that can be changed.

If you use Apache you can read about SSI here:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_include.html
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/howto/ssi.html

PHP:
http://se2.php.net/include/

You can find more easy to read tutorials through google.

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http://yupapa.com

Thank you thank you for the quick response. Since I didn't see a solution in any of the CSS books I read through, I thought the answer might be thus - but than again it may have just been so obvious as to not address it.

The solutions you suggest are not familiar to me - so I'll have to look into them.

Thanks again!

You're welcome.

Yes, read up a little before you decide. You must check what's available to you on the server too. If you are on an Apache server, most likely both SSI and PHP are there. On Windows you'll have ASP. I *think* SSI is used in that case. I don't think ASP has its own include mechanism.

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http://yupapa.com