did you get the solution yet? I can help you with this. Your JavaScript has a some very evident problems.

No. Understand the differences between SERVER SIDE and CLIENT SIDE scripting. Tehsage mentioned including common files that contain part of the page layout to build a complete webpage, which is something SSI was created for. JavaScript is quite possibly the worst solution to this.

Also, JQuery might be fine for you to tart up existing sites, but you can't expect every visitor of Tehsage's site to download Firefox and an extension before they can see anything. And that's assuming that they care to use JavaScript in the first place. Server side scripting is unaffected by this.

You're correct in the purpose of SSI is for including specific pieces into a webpage (such as header and footer in the OP's example).  When I skimmed the thread it looked like the OP was looking at DOM manipulation but upon rereading it, it does seem like he's looking for a simple include functionality which SSI would provide.  It's strange that the server would not provide PHP functionality unless it's a windows server.  In that case you could use .net, but that would likely be way overkill for this project.

Also, the Firefox extension I was talking about is one that lets me run client-side scripts on existing websites.  It has nothing to do with this discussion other than explanation for how I could do some nifty things with the framework.  As a result your second paragraph is garbage, but it does show that I should have been more specific about what I was speaking of.

Hold on, people; we're all being dumb here. Question One: what server is your school's site using?

What the TC needs here is not JavaScript, but some kind of server-side processing system. SSI is far from optimal, but it may be all he's got, and if that's what he can use then that's what he should use. JavaScript is not appropriate for what he's trying to do, and he realizes that, but he's trying to make the best of a bad situation. The question is, might there be an even better solution?

What you're doing was envisioned by the W3C when they decided to create the iframe tag in HTML ...

Beyond that, if you're using a web-server like IIS or Tomcat it probably makes far more sense to try to make dynamic pages using ASP.NET (in C#) or Servlets using Java (and probably some framework like JSP/JSF/Facelets).

I'll get back to you on that once I find out.