Comment by superkuh
4 days ago
Plain HTML and CSS personal site experience can be vastly improved by using server side includes. Your webserver's SSI module is likely just the right amount of templating power so you don't have to re-write the same HTML in $x spots with a minimal attack surface and maintenance burden. SSI hasn't changed in 20 years and the nginx module at least hasn't even ever had a cve.
<!--# include file="/menu.html" -->
...
<!--# include file="/footer.html" -->
This type of ssi templating is extremely useful for static HTML sites using .html (and other) files on filesystems. I've been using it since hosting my website on my 56k modem in 1999 with Xitami server on Win98. Now I do it hosting from my cable modem in 2025 with nginx on linux.
SSI's were my first foray into "backend," if you can even call it that, sometime around the year 2000. Some benevolent commenter on Slashdot gave me the tipoff, and my growing frustration with copy-pasting HTML snippets between pages was henceforth a thing of the past. Then came PHP, Python, et cetera, and the rest is history.
Amazing how such a simple mechanism can remain useful even decades later.