really dumb ssi question

[venturi]

Nope, Cleo, it shouldn't... I won't say "never" because there is no "never" with server admin. LOL

Using the XBitHack on setting in .htaccess ONLY parses your .html files that have permissions of 755 to be parsed. Normal HTML & PHP files should have persmissions of 644

The other option is to do the AddHandler .htaccess entry, or updating httpd.conf in apache, which WILL cause ALL .html to be parsed for SSI - and that will drag a server to its knees if you have lots of domains running and/or tons of pages and/or traffic.

PHP/Perl files should not be affected by either - if I understand the Apache docs correctly.

XBitHack is a very useful tool to use if you have LOTS of html pages and/or traffic but only have select few that are utilizing SSI.

I have used this many times when building premium AVS sites, for example, where I have literally 1000's of images loading on HTML but I only wanted my index/gallery pages to use SSI - the full-image HTML pages were treated as generic HTML.

BTW, my host on my virtual server account actually recommended the XBitHack method to me when I inquired about this subject a couple years ago because it lessens the strain on the server.