Browsing titles using categories Aa-Af, Ag-Ar, etc Options

[Tasteloss]

This is a bit difficult to explain but here it goes. I'm working on a book website where users will be able to browse the book inventory by author. Once at the "Browse by Author" page they will be able to click any letter of the alphabet to bring up authors' names beginning with that letter. To make navigating easier I want to break each letter of the alphabet into smaller subgroups so if I have 700 authors with names beginning with A, the user doesn't have to scroll through 10 pages to get to an author named "Askew" or "Azaria". Each letter would be split "Aa-Af, Ag-Al, Am-Ar, As-Az"

Now to the question. I have the page set up and in the header it says "Browse by author", then next to it all the letters are lined up and each letter links to a new page where the text that once said "browse by author" would now simply say "Aa-Af", or whatever category I was in. Everything else in the header is the same. All that changes is that one text from "Browse by Author" to "Aa-Af, etc." Do I need to create a new html for every single subcategory if all that changes is that one text? Is there some way I can have the text write itself every time the user clicks a category so I don't need over 100 of virtually identical html files?

I hope this makes some sense and that someone can help. Please feel free to ask for any clarification, I know this isn't easy to follow. Thanks in advance for any help.

[Darin McGrew]

I recommend that you generate all the different HTML documents. But I also recommend that you generate them automatically, either with a preprocessing script that generates static HTML files that live on your web server, or with a server-side (e.g., CGI, PHP) script that generates each page dynamically, when it is requested.