Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 04/05/06 22:59

On Wed, 5 Apr 2006, rfr launched boldly forth atop a fullquote
(usually a warning sign on usenet):

> If one does their web site authoring and development on their PC, as

Do I take it that by "PC" you mean Windows? (PC hardware can also run
real operating systems, but I'll go along with the assumption that
you're talking about some recent-ish flavour of Windows).

> I do, and developes documents on a stage-by-stage, visualizing
> basis, then using server-side includes is not an option. Because it
> is not possible to visualize the impact of server-side includes on
> documents created on ones PC ( unless one wants to run a full server
> on his PC).

Can't agree. Win32 Apache2 is quite easy to install, and can offer
an environment which is close enough to one's production Apache
(unix-ish) server for many practical purposes. I've got Apache2 on
my Windows laptop, and I definitely recommend doing it, if you aim to
do any serious web development on your peecee. Far more realistic
than trying to browse files directly in the filesystem.

You may want to configure it so that it can only be accessed from
localhost (or whatever range of local addresses you care to trust).

> Also, server-side includes change the way one names files from .htm
> or .html to .shtml extensions,

Not necessarily. Apache configuration is very flexible.

> so that the server knows which documents to parse,
> looking for includes.

Admittedly, the Win32 file system doesn't make this as straightforward
as the unix one, where the use of XBitHack with the file system's "x"
permission bits can do the trick; but you can configure server parsing
via a <Files...> bracket to target precisely the files which you wish
to parse.

Or you might be interested in
http://search.cpan.org/~rkobes/Apache-WinBitHack-0.01/WinBitHack.pm
although I haven't tried it myself. Obviously you'd need Perl
installed in order to use this.

There are other configuration possibilities. Up to you, really.

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