[Xitami] SSI & frames

[Carl Moreland]

I am re-writing my web site and I want to make it more dynamic, using Perl
scripts to build page elements. I am using frames, each frame calls a .shtml
file which simply has an <!--#exec cgi="/cgi-bin/blahblah.pl"-->. So far, I
have 3 frames: a top header, a left menu area, and a main area.

When I run this on my laptop using Xitami, only 2 of the 3 frames get built,
never all 3, and it sometimes varies as to which 2 get displayed. The third
frame is visually blank, and it acts as if the .shtml file did not even get
parsed as clicking 'view source' on that frame gives me the source for the
frameset (index.html). I can eliminate any one frame and the other 2 will
always load correctly.

Now, I can load the whole she-bang on my web host server (Linux/Apache, I
think) and it all works just fine. URL is http://www.thunting.com/geotech2.
Does Xitami have problems with multiple SSI calls in frames?

Also, I'm only familiar with good ol' HTML and Perl, and JavaScript to a
lesser extent. Is there a better way to dynamically build relatively simple
web pages? For some of my stuff, I will parse data files to build page
content, other times I will just write the HTML code in a Perl script, which
allows me to use config files to alter the look & feel of the entire site. I
see discussions about PHP, which I know nothing about, but I'm reluctant to
invest a lot of time learning something entirely new for such a minor
project.

Also, in making web pages fully dynamic, it would seem that web search
spiders would not be able to "look" at the content of the pages. Is this
right? Is there a simple way to deal with this?

Many thanks,
Carl