RE: include in html

At 9:08 AM 4/17/98, David Norris wrote:
>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.

Its better with a hybrid solution where the server builds a document from
multiple entities but also leaves some of the merging to the browser.

For example, one might want to build a document based on content from
multiple servers. This would be far more efficiently solved by the browser
than require the content to pass by the server.

The discussion about where in the system the inclusion should occur is an
old one. When I first suggested that some form for INCLUDE capability was
added to HTML (back in 1993) I had browser-side transclusion in mind.
However, the server developers was quick to identify that inclusion could
quickly be implemented on the server, so that's what we got.

SSI is an ugly and unfortunate hack to achieve inclusion. The functionality
is (and was) already covered by the markup standard, so SSI reinvented the
wheel. Expect it to be faded out of use as web authors get used to XML
entities.

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Received on Friday, 17 April 1998 16:30:50 UTC