Why can't HTML alone do includes? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#161

Post by fooker » Sat, May 03, 2025, 10:27 PM UTC

dimal wrote: post #17

This was the rabbit hole that I started down in the late 90s and still haven’t come out of. I was the webmaster of the Analog Science Fiction website and I was building tons of static pages, each with the same header and side bar. It drove me nuts. So I did some research and found out about Apache server side includes. Woo hoo! Keeping it DRY (before I knew DRY was a thing). Yeah, we’ve been solving this over and ove…

> Why not have a simple client side method for this?

Like writing a line of js?

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#162

Post by Sesse__ » Sat, May 03, 2025, 10:27 PM UTC

thayne wrote: post #159

simonjgreen wrote: post #150

I know it’s not straight HTML, but SSI (server side includes) helped with this and back in the day made for some incredibly powerful caching solutions. You could write out chunks of your site statically and periodically refresh them in the server side, while benefitting from serving static content to your users. (This was in the pre varnish era, and before everyone was using memcached) I personally used this to great…

One benefit of doing it on the client is the client can cache the result of an include. So for example, instead of having to download the content of a header and footer for every page, it is just downloaded once and re-usef for future pages

How big are your headers and footers, really? If caching them is worth the extra complexity on the client plus all the pain of cache invalidation (and the two extra requests in the non-cached case).

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#163

Post by mr_toad » Sat, May 03, 2025, 10:29 PM UTC

1718627440 wrote: post #102

This is just my own understanding, but doesn't a webpage consist of a bunch of nodes, which can be combined in any way. And an html document is supposed to be a complete set of nodes, so a combination of those won't be a single document anymore. Nodes can be addressed individually, but a document is the proportion for transmission containing also metadata. You can combined nodes as you like, but you can't really comb…

> a webpage consist of a bunch of nodes, which can be combined in any way

More or less, but manipulating the nodes requires JavaScript, which some people would like to avoid.

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#164

Post by dheera » Sat, May 03, 2025, 10:31 PM UTC

Seems everyone forgot HTML-SSI which worked something like this. Many servers and hosting websites of the 90s supported it.

    
    Some content here

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#165

Post by matchagaucho » Sat, May 03, 2025, 10:37 PM UTC

dimal wrote: post #17

This was the rabbit hole that I started down in the late 90s and still haven’t come out of. I was the webmaster of the Analog Science Fiction website and I was building tons of static pages, each with the same header and side bar. It drove me nuts. So I did some research and found out about Apache server side includes. Woo hoo! Keeping it DRY (before I knew DRY was a thing). Yeah, we’ve been solving this over and ove…

I've become a fan of https://htmx.org for this reason.

A small 10KB lib that augments HTML with the essential good stuff (like dynamic imports of static HTML)

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#166

Post by mark_and_sweep » Sat, May 03, 2025, 10:39 PM UTC

_heimdall wrote: post #131

mark_and_sweep wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe XSLT 1 is still working in all major browsers today. Here's a simple HTML 5 example with two pages sharing a header template: https://gist.github.com/MarkTiedemann/0e6d36c337159a3e6d5072...

My main gripe is a decade(s?) old Firefox bug related to rendering an HTML string to the DOM. That may be a fairly specific use case though, and largely it still works great today. I've done a few side projects with XSLT and web components for interactivity, worked great.

What bug specifically?

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#167

Post by paulryanrogers » Sat, May 03, 2025, 10:42 PM UTC

HTML does have frames and iframes, which can accomplish some of the same goals.

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#168

Post by crazygringo » Sat, May 03, 2025, 10:42 PM UTC

giantrobot wrote: post #152

crazygringo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the most likely answer. I'm not defending it, because when I started web development this was one of the first problems I ran into as well -- how the heck do you include a common header. But the original concept of HTML was standalone documents, not websites with reusable components like headers and footers and navbars. That being said, I still don't understand why then the frames monstrosity was inve…

Frames were widely abused by early web apps to do dynamic interfaces before XHR was invented/widely supported. The "app" had a bunch of sub-frames with all the links and forms carefully pointing to different frames in the frameset. A link in a sidebar frame would open a link in the "editor" frame which loaded a page with a normal HTML form. Submitting the form reloaded it in that same frame. Often the form would have…

Oh my goodness, yes you're right, I'd forgotten entirely about those.

They were horrible -- you'd hit the back button and only one of the frames would go back and then the app would be in an inconsistent state... it was a mess!

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#169

Post by hollowturtle » Sat, May 03, 2025, 10:45 PM UTC

paulryanrogers wrote: post #167

HTML does have frames and iframes, which can accomplish some of the same goals.

it is mentioned in the article indeed; it's an awful solution that is poor in performance and break the accessibility

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#170

Post by mr_toad » Sat, May 03, 2025, 10:46 PM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #70

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it happens, the major browsers still can do XML 'includes' to some extent, since by some miracle they haven't torn out their support for XSLT 1.0. E.g. this outputs "FizzBuzz" on Firefox: Fizz Buzz You can even use XSLT for HTML5 output, if you're careful. But YMMV with which XML processors will support stylesheets.

Yep, and this can be used to e.g. make a basically static site template and then do an include for `userdata.xml` to decorate your page with the logged in user's info (e.g. on HN, adding your username in the top right, highlighting your comments and showing the edit/delete buttons, etc.). You can for example include into a variable ` ` and then use it in xpath expressions like `$myinfo/user/@id`. Extremely simple, go…

> I will never understand why it didn't take off.

I’ve used XSLT in anger - I used it to build Excel worksheets (in XML format) using libXSLT. I found it very verbose and hard to read. And Xpath is pretty torturous.

I wish I could have used Javascript. I wish Office objects were halfway as easy to compose as the DOM. I know a lot of people hate on Javascript and the DOM, but it’s way easier to work with than the alternatives.