alt Hacker NewsThe feature proposal was called HTML Imports [1], created as part of the Web Components effort.
> HTML Imports are a way to include and reuse HTML documents in other HTML documents
There were plans for <template> tag support and everything.
If I remember correctly, Google implemented the proposed spec in Blink but everyone else balked for various reasons. Mozilla was concerned with the complexity of the implementation and its security implications, as well as the overlap with ES6 modules. Without vendor support, the proposal was officially discontinued.
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HTML Imports went in a similar direction but they do not do what the blog post is about. HTML should be imported and displayed in a specific place of the document. HTML Imports could not do this without JavaScript.
See https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/2791#issuecomment-3112... for details.
To be fair, it was pretty complicated. IIRC, using it required using Javascript to instantiate the template after importing it, rather than just having something like <include src="myinclude.html">.
https://caniuse.com/imports says FF even had it as a config flag
Tbf, HTML Imports were significantly more complex than includes, which this article requests.
Frames essentially could do html import
That matches with the comment [1] on the article, citing insufficient demand, no vendor enthusiasm, etc.
The thing is that all those are non-reasons that don't really explain anything: Low demand is hard to believe if this feature is requested for 20 years straight and there are all kinds of shim implementations using scripts, backend engines, etc. (And low demand didn't stop other features that the vendors were interested in for their own reasons)
Vendor refusal also doesn't explain why they refused it, even to the point of rolling back implementations that already existed.
So I'd be interested to understand the "various reasons" in more detail.
"Security implications" also seem odd as you already are perfectly able to import HTML cross origin using script tags. Why is importing a script that does document.write() fine, but a HTML tag that does exactly the same thing hugely problematic?
(I understand the security concern that you wouldn't want to allow something like "<import src=google.com>" and get an instant clone of the Google homepage. But that issue seems trivially solvable with CORS.)
[1] https://frontendmasters.com/blog/seeking-an-answer-why-cant-...