Re: HTML Architecture (Was: Future of HTML)

On Fri, 20 Mar 1998, Russell Steven Shawn O'Connor wrote:

> I'd like to add that my motivation for wanting an HTML Architecture comes
> from a desire to allow authors to create their own entities for client-side
> includes.  For example, I want the following to be legal HTML:
> [...]

I was hoping we would be able to use OBJECT for this, but as far
as I know none of the popular browsers support transclusion of
HTML objects. This might be a good thing for someone to hack into
Netscape once the source is released.

For compatibility with the existing browser base, someone could
write an Apache module which checks the capabilities of the UA
making the request and expands any HTML OBJECTs on the fly for
UAs which don't understand inline HTML objects. (and after the
first time it does such an expansion, store it in a local
(server-side) cache for efficiency.)

> The advantages of client-side includes over server-side includes include
> better caching, less load on the server, and less network traffic.

I agree this could have huge benefits in terms of caching and
network traffic; for example, in a typical news page from c|net
news.com:

    http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,20279,00.html?st.ne.fd.mdh

a third of the page is the left side navigation bar, which changes
very infrequently and should be highly cacheable, another third is in
the headlines on the right which change maybe a few times per hour,
and only a *tenth* of the page is the actual story itself.

-- 
Gerald Oskoboiny              <gerald@w3.org>  +1 617 253 2920
System Administrator, W3C     http://www.w3.org/People/Gerald/
World Wide Web Consortium, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
545 Technology Square,  Room NE43-353  Cambridge MA  02139 USA

Received on Friday, 20 March 1998 16:07:32 UTC