cgi, reusing html. common problem?

[Walter Dörwald]

John M. Gabriele wrote:

> I'm putting together a small site using Python and cgi.
> 
> (I'm pretty new to this, but I've worked a little with
> JSP/servlets/Java before.)
> 
> Almost all pages on the site will share some common (and
> static) html, however, they'll also have dynamic aspects.
> I'm guessing that the common way to build sites like this
> is to have every page (which contains active content) be
> generated by a cgi script, but also have some text files
> hanging around containing incomplete html fragments which
> you read and paste-in as-needed (I'm thinking:
> header.html.txt, footer.html.txt, and so on).
> 
> Is that how it's usually done? If not, what *is* the
> usual way of handling this?

I don't know if it's the *usual* way, but you could give XIST a try 
(http://www.livinglogic.de/Python/xist). It was developed for exactly 
this purpose: You implement reusable HTML fragments in Python and you 
can use any kind of embedded dynamic language (PHP and JSP are supported 
out of the box).

Bye,
    Walter Dörwald