I have been trying to incorporate my navigation bar into each page of my website using a server side include. My goal is to be able to just change one file and each page would have the amendment. I have recently asked a question about this and got a solid response: <!--#include virtual="menu.cgi" --> or <!--#include file="footer.html" -->
This sounds like it works great but in my coding editor, brackets. It treats this as a comment and therefore does not work.
Server Side Includes, as their name suggests, are a feature of a web server.
They shouldn't "work" in a text editor. That is just a tool to let you edit the code. (And the syntax is designed to be the same as HTML comment syntax so that tools handling plain HTML will treat them as comments).
Test your code using a web server.