Discussion on:

Using Client Side Includes instead of Server Side Includes

I used this simple idea at a company 2 years ago as part of a corporate portal. The idea was stretched farther by having all intranet sites use a standard header, footer, and css by doing a CSI. The CSI was actually a JSP that produced dynamic personalized content in the header (depending on user roles). This made it fast and easy to incorporate into all sites. A word of caution of course with going to this extreme is that if the CSI hosting site goes down, then all consumer sites look bad (no CSS).

I've also been using this technique as a way to have a dynamically updated site that is not dependent upon a database and will still work fine if the database server is down.

But, there is one problem I've had. Search engines don't see the text that is included throught CSI's, whereas they do if it is an SSI.

Many times I don't need search engines to see that text, but other times it is important. Does anyone know if there is a way to instruct search engines to index text included through JavaScript functions??

I've used this CSI technique heavily for some of the short term marketing sites I've worked on.

This technique especially fits well for these since:

- Search engines have less time to index them anyway, these sites are also usually advertised through other means
- These sites have mostly static content, some text, images and Flash
- It's more acceptable to require Javascript with these (versus the accessibility requirements of the corporate site) Also, some of these sites already require Flash anyway and some already require Javascript to do the Flash detection.

I remember once my boss asked me to change the copyright year in the footer on a bunch of these .html only sites, and with a big grin I said, "No problem, give me 15 minutes"

I wrote a JavaScript Include system with implementations in several Ajax libraries. Check out the post here:

http://www.forgeniuses.com/?p=3