I'm asking in regards to otherwise-static webpages which include files like headers, footers, etc. Obviously building a dynamic site with SSI would be better done with PHP.
Is there ever any reason to do
<!--#include virtual="../quote.txt" -->
instead of
<?php include("../quote.txt"); ?>
(or the equivalent in another language)?
I'm asking because I've been given the task of updating a website which is currently using SSI for including the same header on different pages.
If you're not using any other PHP in the page, using an SSI means your Apache processes don't need to load up the PHP interpreter to generate and serve the HTML.