Server Side Includes

Hey there kiddo! So you remember how we make web pages right? We use HTML and CSS to make it pretty and use Javascript to make it interactive. But sometimes, we need to include some things that are the same in every page, like maybe a header or a footer or even a menu. And we don't want to copy paste the same thing over and over again in every page, that's too much work and it's not efficient.

So, that's where server side includes come in. Let's imagine we have a website and we want to include a header in every page. Instead of copying and pasting the header code on every page, we can create a separate file that contains just the header code, and we call it "header.html".

When someone visits our website and requests a page, the server (a big computer that serves up web pages) sees that the requested page contains a server-side include (usually indicated by a special code). It then fetches the contents of the file we named "header.html" (our header code), and inserts it into the requested page, replacing the special code with the actual header code. This is all done on the server-side, which means the visitor never even sees the special code or knows that the server included another file in the requested page.

So, in summary, server side includes are a way for us to reuse code across multiple web pages to make things efficient and easy for us. We create a separate file with the code we want to reuse, and then include it in our web pages using a special code. The server then fetches that included code and adds it to the requested page before it is sent to the visitor. And that's it! Pretty neat, huh?