JavaScript vs. Server-Side Includes

[Thomas Dowling]

>Recently Sam Khosh-khui posted a question about using
>JavaScript to automatically generate the last-modified date
>for inclusion in web pages.  Christopher Lock responded
>with a few tips and mentioned that he wanted to use
>JavaScript to replace the similar SSI technique.  Chris
>mentioned that the SSI technique "entails a nontrivial
>performance hit on the server."

Non-trivial hit on the server, non-trivial hit on the client... Let us bow
our heads and mumble some phrases that the CDA would have covered, over the
contortions we're willing endure, all to make browsers cough up a bit of
information they already have:

olc2.wright.edu> telnet www.ohiolink.edu 80
Trying 130.108.120.21...
Connected to olc2.OHIOLINK.edu.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 1997 20:10:00 GMT
Server: Apache/1.2.0
Last-Modified: Wed, 11 Jun 1997 14:39:06 GMT
ETag: "5a07-1126-339eb88a"
Content-Length: 4390
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html...



Of the browsers I have at my fingertips, only NCSA Mosaic and Lynx let me
at this information.  MSIE 4.0b and Communicator 4.01 helpfully tell me
when I added a document to my disk cache.  Gee, thanks.  Makes you wonder
exactly where the cutting edge lies.

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu