Question

They seem to be basically the same EXCEPT that you have to give ssi an absolute path for “security reasons”. Except for keyword arguments (which are new since version 1.3), the two seem to have exactly the same capabilities. Are they really redundant?

Answer 1

Without the parsed parameter to {% ssi %} the included file won’t be treated as a Django template, it will just be included as normal text. This means that if the included file had template tags/filters, they would not be interpreted.

When you do include the parsed parameter, the differences become more like what you said.

• There’s added security restrictions with {% ssi %} since you can potentially include any file on the filesystem.
• You must use an absolute URI rather than a relative path suitable for a template loader.
• Until Django 1.5, the first argument (the path) must be unquoted. This means you cannot use a template variable as the first argument.

There’s more details on the last point in the documentation.