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atoav • 05/03/2025 • 1 reply • view on HN

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>
The thing that always bugged me about frames is that they are too clever. I don't want to reload only the frame html when I rightclick and reload. Sure the idea was to cache those separately, but come on — frames and caching are meant to solve two different problems and by munching them together they somewhat sucked at solving either.

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>
To tell the browser it should load the inner html or the src of that element from cache if it has it.

Now you could convince me thst the include should allow for more, but it being dumb is a feature not a bug.

Replies

lodovic • 05/04/2025

Nitpick: the HTML4 spec was released in December 1997, and HTML4.01 only in December 1999 so it probably wouldn't have run in 1996s Netscape.

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