This tutorial has covered the major uses of SSI's and how to employ a number
of tricks programmatically instrument componentized web sites. Well, SSI's
come pretty close to looking like a programming language (we've demonstrated
getting/setting variables, conditional logic and formatting dates for instance).
Things that are conspicuously missing that you might want from a "real"
programming language include complex data structures, loops and the ability
to access persistent logic (i.e. you can include a CGI component but the
overhead incurred with per-request invocatio is high).
For more sophisticated component systems, it is suggested you check out
In addition to component systems, there are a number of data transformation
systems of interest that render content from XML representations using XSLT
Other resources