Re: Header, Footer, and Sidebars

The link update problem is easy to fix.  A smarter server.  We should not
worry too much about the problem of updating pages, only structuring them
well for the end user.  The server should do the dirty work of updating the
contents.  If the site is large and updating hundreds of navigation aids is
an issue then you need to have the server include the navigation segment
from separate files.  I use, a publicly developed freeware HTML parser, PHP
2.x ( http://php.iquest.net/ ) to build and/or include navigation aids into
the document.  There is very minimal server load using PHP to parse a large
collection of files.  This way, I only need to update the files containing
the navigation information.  The current means has an infinitely larger set
of disadvantages.  The time it takes to download the navigation information
could be impacted.  It would be worth the impact for me to know that
everyone has all of the necessary information included in every document.
Besides, navigation information is typically not very large.

,David Norris
World Wide Web - http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/1652/
My Home's Web - http://kg9ae.dyn.ml.org/
ICQ Universal Internet Number - 412039
E-Mail - kg9ae@geocities.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Bagot <timothy.bagot@keble.oxford.ac.uk>
To: Style Sheet mailing list <www-style@w3.org>; HTML mailing list
<www-html@w3.org>
Date: Wednesday, November 26, 1997 9:37 AM
Subject: RE: Header, Footer, and Sidebars


>This approach does have a slight disadvantage: the navigation aids must be
>reproduced on the places they link to, meaning
>
>1) If they contain lots of images, etc., it takes longer to download the
>page linked to.
>
>2) Any change to the navigation aids must be made to several different
>documents, unless they are embedded, which would would defeat the object.

Received on Wednesday, 26 November 1997 11:17:17 UTC