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Why can't HTML alone do includes?

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Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#291

Post by throwaway346434 »

riffraff wrote: post #222
echelon wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too bad we didn't go down the XHTML/semantic web route twenty years ago. Strict documents, reusable types, microformats, etc. would have put search into the hands of the masses rather than kept it in Google's unique domain. The web would have been more composible and P2P. We'd have been able to slurp first class article content, comments, contact details, factual information, addresses, etc., and built a wealth…

I kinda agree with you but I'd argue the "death" of microformats is unrelated to the death of XHTML (tho schema.org is still around). You could still use e.g. hReview today, but nobody does. In the end the problem of microformats was that "I want my content to be used outside my web property" is something nobody wants, beyond search engines that are supposed to drive traffic to you. The fediverse is the only chance o…

JSON LD is alive and kicking.

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#292

Post by throwaway346434 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #235
echelon wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too bad we didn't go down the XHTML/semantic web route twenty years ago. Strict documents, reusable types, microformats, etc. would have put search into the hands of the masses rather than kept it in Google's unique domain. The web would have been more composible and P2P. We'd have been able to slurp first class article content, comments, contact details, factual information, addresses, etc., and built a wealth…

The semantic web is a silly dream of the 90s and 00s. It's not a realizabile technology, and Google basically showed exactly why: as soon as you have a fixed algorithm for finding pages on the web, people will start gaming that algorithm to prioritize their content over others'. And I'm not talking about malicious actors trying to publish malware, but about every single publisher that has theoney to invest in figurin…

I would encourage you to go and read more about triples/asserting facts, and the trust/provenance of facts in this context. You are basically saying "it's impossible to make basic claims" in your comment, which perhaps you don't realize

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#293

Post by superkuh »

I still use server side includes. It is absolutely the best ratio of templating power to attack surface. SSI basically hasn't changed in the last 20 years and is solid in apache, nginx, etc. You can avoid all the static site generator stuff and just write pure .html files.

It should not have gone away. It never did for me.

Also, this is kind of what 'frames' were and how they were used. Everything old is new again.

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#294

Post by PaulHoule »

safety1st wrote: post #268
echelon wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too bad we didn't go down the XHTML/semantic web route twenty years ago. Strict documents, reusable types, microformats, etc. would have put search into the hands of the masses rather than kept it in Google's unique domain. The web would have been more composible and P2P. We'd have been able to slurp first class article content, comments, contact details, factual information, addresses, etc., and built a wealth…

I'm as big a critic of Google as anyone, but I'm always surprised at modern day takes around the lost semantic web technologies - they are missing facts or jumping to conclusions in hindsight. Here's what people should know. 1) The failure of XHTML was very much a multi-vendor, industry-wide affair; the problem was that the syntax of XML was stricter than the syntax of HTML, and the web was already littered with brok…

The “semantic web” has been successful in a few areas but not so much as SQL or document databases. Many data formats use it, such RSS feeds and XMP metadata used by Adobe tools.

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#295

Post by johnisgood »

HumanOstrich wrote: post #214
matchagaucho wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Seems like overkill to bring in a framework just for inlining some static html. If that's all you're doing, a self-replacing script tag is neat: function includeHTML(url) { const s = document.currentScript fetch(url).then(r => r.text()).then(h => { s.insertAdjacentHTML('beforebegin', h) s.remove() }) } ... includeHTML('/footer.html') The `script` element is replaced with the html from `/footer.html`.

But this requires JavaScript...

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#296

Post by PaulHoule »

api wrote: post #85
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…

The web seems like it was deliberately designed to make any form of composability impossible. It’s one of the worst things about it as a platform. I’m sure some purist argument has driven this somewhere.

I think of all the “hygienic macro” sorts of problems. You really ought to be able to transclude a chunk of HTML and the associated CSS into another document but you have to watch out for ‘id’ being unique never mind the same names being used for CSS classes. Figuring out the rendering intent for CSS could also be complicated: the guest CSS might be written like

   .container .style { … }
Where the container is basically the whole guest document but you still want those rules to apply…. Maybe, you want the guest text to appear in the same font as the host document but you still want colors and font weights to apply. Maybe you want to make the colors muted to be consistent with the host document, maybe the background of the host document is different and the guest text isn’t contrasts enough anymore, etc.

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#297

Post by recursivedoubts »

gforce_de wrote: post #274
matchagaucho wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The minified version needs ~51 kilobytes (16 compressed): $ curl --location --silent "https://unpkg.com/htmx.org@2.0.4" | wc -c 50917 $ curl --location --silent "https://unpkg.com/htmx.org@2.0.4" | gzip --best --stdout | wc -c 16314

see fixi if you want bare-bones version of the same idea:

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/fixi

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#298

Post by vacuity »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #248
ummonk wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Images and videos are not semantic content. The alt attributes that describe them on the other hand are indeed semantic content.

> Images and videos are not semantic content Something in that tenet does not compute with me.

I think the distinction is "semantic on what level/perspective?". An image packaged as a binary blob is semantically opaque until it is rendered. Meanwhile, seeing in the HTML or the file extension .jpg in any context that displays file extensions tells me some information right out of the gate. And note that all three of these examples are different information: the HTML tag tells me it's an image, whereas the file extension tells me it's a JPEG image, and the image tells me what the image contains. HTML is an example of some kind of separation, as it can tell you some semantic meaning of the data without telling you all of it. Distinguishing and then actually separating semantics means data can be interpreted with different semantics, and we usually choose to focus on one alternative interpretation. Then I can say that HTML alone regards some semantics (e.g. there is an image here) while disregarding others (e.g. the image is an image of a brick house).

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#299

Post by panny »

SVG use element can do exactly what the OP desires. SVGs can be inlined in html and html can be inlined in SVG too. I never understand why web devs learn html and then stop there instead of also learning svg which looks just like html, but with a lot more power.

Re: Why can't HTML alone do includes?

#300

Post by PaulHoule »

johnisgood wrote: post #295
HumanOstrich wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like overkill to bring in a framework just for inlining some static html. If that's all you're doing, a self-replacing script tag is neat: function includeHTML(url) { const s = document.currentScript fetch(url).then(r => r.text()).then(h => { s.insertAdjacentHTML('beforebegin', h) s.remove() }) } ... includeHTML('/footer.html') The `script` element is replaced with the html from `/footer.html`.

But this requires JavaScript...

... but the folks behind that standard don't want to encourage browsing with Javascript off.
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