Re: Control Text-file Embedding in HTML-docs

> The reason to have the TXT-files is reuse and "update-in-one-place" only.

There is no reason why this should be text/plain rather than text/html.

> 
> If the same piece of text must be used in multiple HTML-documents it is  
> nice to edit and maintain it in one place.
> This ensures that the changes take effect everywhere the TXT-file is used.

The normal way of doing this with text/html inserts is by server
side includes.  The one catch is that most systems fail to set the
Last-Modfied-Date header sensibly (i.e. to the date of the most recent
of pattern or inclusion, except where the inclusion isn't real content).

Unfortunately, in the real world, most web designers want to know how
to force the browser to fetch the complete page every time, rather than
how to optimise caching.

In a full enough implementation of XML based languages, you should be able
to use external entities, although I'm not sure if compliant browsers are
required to support them.  These are theoretically usable in HTML, but
I don't think any browser is that SGML compliant.

I believe there is also XML namespace that has an include element, which
would probably be the reccommended technique for any new W3C XHTML.

Received on Thursday, 29 March 2007 22:13:27 UTC