Re: Missing Functionality: Include

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 1:52 AM, David Woolley
<forums@david-woolley.me.uk> wrote:
> One final point is that, if you look at typical commercial web sites, they
> are so bloated with style attributes, embedded style sheets and Javascript
> libraries, that is clear that the authoring community doesn't actually care
> about keeping transmitted page sizes down.  Cleanly written semantic HTML is
> actually rather compact and fast to load.

This is true for most websites, but there are a lot of websites
(especially those based on major software packages, rather than built
in-house) that do try to minimize loading time.  Semantic HTML only
gets you so far: there are still usually large chunks of repeated HTML
on every page, for navigation bars and so on.

I admittedly haven't benchmarked the actual performance difference
from a 20% reduction in the size of a fairly large HTML page, say --
it might not be too large.  In that case, this is probably more
complexity than it's worth, especially given its inflexibility.  As
Roland rightly points out, it wouldn't work well if you want to
highlight the current location or whatnot, which is common.  <iframe
seamless> from HTML5 would replicate almost all of the functionality
anyway, and AJAX can minimize downloaded content better than any sort
of declarative include like this.

Received on Monday, 11 May 2009 13:33:12 UTC