I've had success creating some menus from tutorials based on a single html page, a css file, and the csshover.htc file. My problem is that my navigation is in an SSI. Since the include file only includes the body portion, I'm not sure how to proceed in creating a pure CSS horizontal drop-dowm menu compatible in most browsers. Most of the tutorials rely on code (to fix the IE hover problem) being placed in the head portion of the .html (or .shtml, .aso, whatever) file. So since my navigation is in an include file, I don't know how to make it work. Any suggestions or tutorials that could help me?
You can try to add your scripts in the parent page (the page where you add the SSI), before the closing body tag.
Another possibility if you can't get that working is giving the main menus redundant anchors. I was warned about keyboard-only accessibility problems with css-only menus, and having the main buttons have anchors sending users to a page where the bodytext has links to the related subject (what's in the sub-menu) solves both: you don't need the hover htc file then.
I don't understand what you mean. Server side includes have nothing to do with anything. All they do is tell the server to splice in the code in the place where you tell it when the page is requested from the server by the browser. So they have nothing to do with anything. Try this first. Create a test page, and replace the server side include directive with the actual code contained in the file that the server side include points to and see if anything changes. Nothing should change at all because it's the same thing. If you look at the source code of your current page after your browser has loaded it, you will see the actual code rather than the directive for the SSI. This is what your browser is building. Your browser doesn't even know anything about an SSI because the server has already spliced the SSI into the page before your browser has received it. Sorry if I missed something, but I'm confused.