Client-side Include
Lee Daniel Crocker
> What I would like to see in Netscape is an HTML or JavaScript (or
> something) feature that would let webmasters append files to web pages,
> like a server include but run from the client-side, cached as a separate
> document and inserted into the current page as if it had been there all
> along. I don't know, something like an <INSERT SRC="..."> tag or a...
<object type="text/html src="..."></object>
Part of HTML4 already.
--
Lee Daniel Crocker <l...@piclab.com>
<http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
Gerald Oskoboiny
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > What I would like to see in Netscape is an HTML or JavaScript (or
> > something) feature that would let webmasters append files to web pages,
> > like a server include but run from the client-side, cached as a separate
> > document and inserted into the current page as if it had been there all
> > along. I don't know, something like an <INSERT SRC="..."> tag or a...
>
> <object type="text/html src="..."></object>
>
> Part of HTML4 already.
I would *really* like to see support for this added to Mozilla soon.
I think this could have a huge impact on the way people manage Web
sites, and really speed up surfing to boot -- currently a lot of
bandwidth is wasted downloading stuff that ought to be downloaded
once and then cached (site navigation bars, which are relatively
verbose compared to the other HTML markup due to all the hypertext
links.)
Here's some stuff I wrote to www-html a few weeks ago (with a few
thoughts on compatibility with the existing browser base etc.):
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1998Mar/0103
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 1998 16:07:30 -0500 (EST)
From: Gerald Oskoboiny <ger...@w3.org>
To: www-...@w3.org
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.96.98032...@anansi.w3.org>
Subject: 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
<ger...@impressive.net>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/