alt Hacker NewsThis 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 over in different ways. For those saying that iframes are good enough, they’re not. Iframes don’t expand to fit content. And server side solutions require a server. Why not have a simple client side method for this? I think it’s a valid question. Now that we’re fixing a lot of the irritation in web development, it seems worth considering.
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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)
> Iframes don’t expand to fit content
Actually, that was part of the original plan - https://caniuse.com/iframe-seamless
I mean in 1996s netscape you could do this (I run the server for a website that still uses this):
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
<html>
<frameset cols="1000, *">
<frame src="FRAMESET_navigation.html" name="navigation">
<frame src="FRAMESET_home.html" name="in">
</frameset>
</html>
To me includes for HTML should work in the dumbest way possible. And that means: Take the text from the include and paste it where the include was and give the browser the resulting text.
If you want to cache a nav section separately because it appears the same on every page lets add a cache attribute that solves the problem independently:
<nav cache-id="deadbeefnav666">
<some-content></etc>
</nav>
Now you could convince me thst the include should allow for more, but it being dumb is a feature not a bug.
The optimal solution would be using a template engine to generate static documents.
You can message the page dimensions to the parent. To do it x domain you can load the same url into the parent with the height in the #location hash. It won't refresh that way.
> Woo hoo! Keeping it DRY (before I knew DRY was a thing)
I still remember the script I wrote to replace thousands (literally) slightly different headers and footers in some large websites of the 90s. How liberating to finally have that.
Don't Service Workers API provide this now, essentially act like a in-browser proxy to the server.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...
> Why not have a simple client side method for this?
Like writing a line of js?
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.
HTML is a markup language, not a programming language. It's like asking why Markdown can't handle includes. Some Markdown editors support them (just like some server-side tools do for HTML), but not all.
Server-side includes FTW! When a buddy and I started making "web stuff" back in the mid-90s the idea of DRY also just made sense to us.
My dialup ISP back then didn't disable using .htaccess files in the web space they provided to end users. That meant I could turn on server-side includes! Later I figured out how to enable CGI. (I even went so far as to code rudimentary webshells in Perl just so I could explore the webserver box...)