Hi all,

I'm quite rusty at this but volunteered to build a site.

Although this will be a momentary quick fix to have a site running, I'd like to have the menu fetched from a different html file which I already created but somehow it doesn't show.

The menu lays in "menu.html" and has css all in one file within the same folder as "index.html". I can open it in my browser and it loads ok.

The problem is inserting it in the body of the website (index.html). I am using <a href="menu.html"> inside the body but it fails to show it.

I can see the menu only if I put all the css and html code inside the same page which down the road will be a pain when trying to modify it.

Can someone tell me how to properly contain the entire menu bar in a separate html file and which is the correct tag to insert it inside the website's pages?

Thank you!

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All 2 Replies

If you want to seperate the sections of your code, you will need to use PHP and include the files.

<?php include('header.php'); ?>

<?php include('menu.php'); ?>

<?php include('footer.php);>

you can not do this with html files.

Member Avatar for diafol

If you don't use a server-side language like php, you always have SSI (server side includes) - a bit old tech now, but it still works on most servers Apache, IIS etc.

However, it does mean that the pages using SSI must have a special html extension, e.g. .shtml, .stm or .shtm

Here's one I made earlier and it works fine:

index.shtml

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>shtml test</title>
</head>

<body>
<!--#include file="footer.html" -->
</body>
</html>

footer.html

<p>SAY HELLO</p>

I get "SAY HELLO" when I load index.shtml.

SSI was my first foray into web tech back in the early 90s. SSI does a lot more than just this - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes for an intro

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