RE: include in html

I think that creating one document from many files should be left to the
serving machine, editor, or some preprocessor.  I see the advantage, and, I
use it heavily.  But, I am not convinced that it would be best implemented
by the UA.  The argument that your server doesn't support it is not such a
strong one.  Sacrificing compatibility for convenience seems a bit trivial.
Saving disk space shouldn't be a concern.  If the server doesn't support
server side processing then they should give you more storage space for your
duplicated code.

HTML is just a text markup language.  Better tools are needed, not an
element for every situation.  You could easily implement document inclusion
using a preprocessor.  Essentially, compile your documents before upload.  I
have used PHP 3 (http://www.php.net/) to generate documents from a bunch of
files.  PHP 3 is designed to run on the server.  But, you can easily use a
script to have it build many documents and write them out to the file
system.  Then upload.  With PHP3 you could even have it write the files
directly to your FTP directory if you are so inclined.  PHP 3 runs on Unix
variants and Microsoft Windows operating systems as a CGI.  It can compiled
into a module on some web servers, as well.

,David Norris

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-----Original Message-----
From: www-html-request@w3.org [mailto:www-html-request@w3.org]On Behalf
Of Craig Brozefsky
Sent: Thursday, April 16, 1998 8:10 PM
To: LuG PaJ
Cc: www-html@w3.org
Subject: Re: include in html


On Fri, 17 Apr 1998, LuG PaJ wrote:

> hi
> you can also try to use javascript
> you can write in your html file
> <SCRIPT SRC="example.js">
> </SCRIPT>
>
> and create a new example.js file which includes:
> document.write('<HERE YOU CAN WRITE ALL HTML TAGS>')

I think the point is to make it browser independent, and thus not require
that the browser either assemble the componenets itself, or kluge it
together with some one-off scripting language.

The Apache XSSI are very nice indeed, and we use them extensively.

Received on Friday, 17 April 1998 12:08:56 UTC