leveraging Server Side Includes (SSI)?

this is something that would best be integrated in Publii, assuming it’s a reasonable request (SSI is supported by Apache, LiteSpeed, nginx, IIS)

SSI works using shtml files

imagine a nav menu that extends across the entire website – currently, if you add/remove an item, Publii has to republish all those pages, whereas with SSI, it would only have to publish 1 file which is then included in all the other files via the web server (the other files would only contain a special HTML comment that references the file containing the HTML for the menu)

This would have to be an optional element that could be disabled in order for those of us who use static hosts …

good point which i neglected to consider, however a quick search seems to indicate that even those using a static host may be able to benefit from this with some JS that Publii could publish

html – Server side includes alternative – Stack Overflow
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22326742/server-side-includes-alternative

the obvious downside is of course the need to enable JS on the browser side and, personally, i wouldn’t want to require that