Will remapping .HTML to be processed as .SHTML cause problems?

I have a website that has between 350-450 HTML and HTM pages on it. On
August 30th, I'm supposed to update the site so that most (not all) of
these pages use an SSI navigational menu. The change, though, needs to
happen all at once; that is, I needed to copy the files over and have
the new website working fairly instantly (corresponds with a catalog
mailing). There wasn't a way to do that, because I'd have to manually
redirect file1.html to file.shtml and repeat a zillion times...I'm on
satellite inet - my server access is sloooooow.

I ran across this:
http://www.irishdeveloper.com/blog/servers/platforms/windows/iis/using-server-side-includes-in-html-with-iis/
which explains how to reconfigure IIS so that it processes .HTML files
as .SHTML files.

There are a few .html and .htm files that do NOT use this menu. Will
it affect them in any way? And if it won't affect them, is it then
safe to just turn that switch on NOW (make the server process HTML as
SHTML) so that as files with includes are added, they will just work,
rather than having to do it all at once?

Thanks,

Julie Siebel

Will remapping .HTML to be processed as .SHTML cause problems?

It should be fine, but be aware of the following caveats.

.html and .htm are processed as static files on IIS and are very
performant and cacheable.

When you change .html and .htm to be processed as SHTML with
ssinc.dll, these files now require server-side processing and not
cacheable.

This means that CPU utilization of the web server will spike -- how
much depends on the SSI code itself. Furthermore, these responses are
not cached, so the spike will happen on any access of SHTML pages.

In addition, involving SSINC.DLL to process these pages involves
additional code from that DLL, so there is always a security
vulnerability concern that was not there before.

You may consider remapping your SHTML content hidden inside of pages
with .html/.htm extension to ASP.DLL instead of SSINC.DLL because
ASP.DLL also offers SSI processing but does more caching. It is also
more functional than SSI, in case your web pages expand down the road.

FYI: Be aware that SSI technology is quite ancient and being
deprecated on IIS. You certainly cannot expect new features nor bug
fixes within it.


//David
http://w3-4u.blogspot.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/David.Wang
//

Will remapping .HTML to be processed as .SHTML cause problems?

Soooo...pardon my stupidity (you have to wonder why I'm managing this
server - lol)

I'll I'm adding is an #include that has a menu in it. The menu file is
a .html CSS menu (minor javascript function to get by IE's reluctance
to follow CSS menuing systems). So all I really wanna do is dump what
is in that file into the proper place in each file *including* my ASP
files.

Most of the pages on this server *are* .asp pages - well, fewer asp
files, obviously, but it's a travel site, so the bulk of the site is
drawing off an MS SQL Server database of 400 or so properties (with 5
pages each) and 20+ regions, 200+ villages/neighborhoods (2 pages
each). These are the pages most often hit. It seems to me that the ASP
pages on the site *do* cache OK, currently, and they do have includes
(mostly for vbscript functions, though, not for html).

The bulk of the .html files that I'm talking about are just
triplogs...they can be pretty popular, though and I'd really hate to
kill the caching. It's a nice, fast, dual processor, dedicated server,
but it will get hit extremely hard in September and October.

The *only* SSI functionality I want is this #include. So are you
saying that I can add .html and .htm to the asp.dll processing
(instead of editing this shtml extension) and I will get better
performance than I would processing it as an shtml file?

Again, pardon my stupidity. I'm kind of a generalist, and everything I
know about this server (IIS 6.0, btw) I've just learned by messing
around and reading newsgroups! Every once in a while I really goof
something up by trying something that I've read, so I just want to
ensure that I understand what you're trying to tell me!

Thanks so much.

Julie Siebel

Will remapping .HTML to be processed as .SHTML cause problems?

Yes, I think it is easier for you to add two new Application Mappings
to IIS. Both will copy the settings from the .asp Application Mapping,
and you will copy it to the .htm and .html extensions. This will
make .html and .htm files processed by ASP.

Basically, both ASP.DLL and SSINC.DLL will process #include directives
inside the respective script file. ASP is a bit more general and also
more work has been done on its performance. For example, it is
perfectly aware of static HTML files just mapped to ASP.DLL and try to
handle them as optimally as it can.


//David
http://w3-4u.blogspot.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/David.Wang
//

Will remapping .HTML to be processed as .SHTML cause problems?

Just did it and it works BEAUTIFULLY...thanks, David!

Julie