Right, here's an idea I've had. You know how you can use the javascript "document.write" function to write html in your site, something like "document.write('<p>Hello</p>')? Well, say you wanted the same footer on all your pages, then why not save the footer as a javascript script, then call the script from all the pages at the right point. This way the script can be easily editted when necessary, and only needs changing once.

What do you think?

I used to think about doing that as well. But then you've got to worry about all the quotes and escaping them, the multiple document.write's, and the plain fact that not all people have javascript enabled.

Though the last problem isn't seen much these days, the first two would just piss me off I guess if you used a text editor's search and replace feature it wouldn't be that hard...

I wonder how much it would affect rendering time.

I also tried this a little while ago. I'm not sure how much of an issue it is now, but I remember there were problems with some browsers which woudln't load external JavaScript files, though.

Shouldn't be too much of a problem, though. It's exactly the same way Google Adwords works.

I would guess it would work...I mean, as a solution if your server doesn't have PHP. But you could do a similar thing and use the SHTML include (<!--#include virtual="PATH" -->) which is basically identical to the PHP include().