Re: Proposal for <INC SRC="URI"> Element for Compound HTML Documents.

Brian Behlendorf (brian@wired.com)
Fri, 9 Dec 94 19:47:31 EST

On Fri, 9 Dec 1994, Terry Allen wrote:
> In what contexts would you like to use INC? For example, you
> probably wouldn't want to INC another document within an H1.

I would. I'd like to be able to make the header of my document the
result of some script somewhere. I'd like to make the default value for
a form entry where I ask the user to give an email address to be by
default set to the HTTP_FROM CGI environment variable. I'd like to do
many things which right now I can only do with server-side includes (oh
yeah, and we dish out 300K web hits a day with server-side parsing turned
on for all HTML docs, so nyah nyah nyah! :) but a formal way of doing
that which would not require parsing the documents would be really nice.

> An INC'd document could be treated as an SGML SUBDOC entity, but
> that means that it would parse just fine no matter what it contains.
> Maybe this is desirable; would you propose that a browser indicate
> that an INC'd doc is some sort of inclusion, or treat it as a
> transparent part of the parent doc?

I'd like it as transparant as possible. A benefit/drawback of server-side
creation is that the client can't tell which part was dynamically generated
and which was static.

Brian "all good documents have dynamic parts"

--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Your slick hype/tripe/wipedisk/zipped/zippy/whine/online/sign.on.the.ish/oil
pill/roadkill/grease.slick/neat.trick is great for what it is. -- Wired Fan #3
brian@hotwired.com brian@hyperreal.com http://www.hotwired.com/Staff/brian/