In the past, I have always used PHP for even my basic site design stuff, and I have never used the .html extension. Several reasons for doing this, but one of the biggest ones was being able to use "PHP Includes" on my site, so I would only have to design my navigation once.
This worked fine, because Dreamweaver was always able to render basic PHP stuff that was not really "Server-side", like the includes. But now, I am trying to switch to using Adobe Edge Code, because it is truly lightweight and I don't have to load up a big application on slower computers to do work. It is also really nice, because it does have great CSS editing, and a wonderful live preview that just works in browser. From what I have found out, their is no way of doing the cooler stuff, when you are using .php files.
So - I guess my question is, Is it possible to do something like "PHP-Includes" only using HTML/CSS/JS? Or do I really need to stop being lazy and switch my workflow back to doing all HTML, and just Copy/Paste the nav sections on each page.
Also - sorry if this question is to much like a "Discussion", I tried to write it as straight forward as I could.
Edit: The application supports JavaScript, CSS, and HTML and, one of my friends is recommending jQuery. Anyone know how it would work with jQuery? Or if it would?
Vanilla HTML and CSS do not have any facility for includes natively. The closest thing is server-parsed html (aka "shtml") which can do includes, but if you go that route, you may as well just go back to PHP (shtml has no advantages over PHP).
I think your choices are PHP or copy/paste, as you said.