Hacker News Reader

Comment by animex | Hacker News Reader

I think this issue better addressed in HTML spec. Basic functionality to include html snippets files in other HTML files should be standard. What am I missing?

View on HN

Well, the HTML spec is missing that, has been for decades despite people asking for it, and to my knowledge has never even made it to a roadmap.

How would that work? Now one request for a page becomes N requests for every bit of HTML the client needs to render?

You could cache the intermediate bits. Hell you could do this right now (somewhat) by doing script src=menubar.js and the script containing document.write calls. Not great for performance.

That’s sorta the case with frames and asynchronously loaded stuff anyway though right? I think they just consider the problem solved in practice through scripting and frames. Besides, HTML doesn’t have room for that— they need room for all the features nobody uses and cares about. XD I’ve been writing HTML to some extent for 30 years and I periodically come across shit— not even new shit— that I swear I’ve never even heard of.

> That’s sorta the case with frames and asynchronously loaded stuff anyway though right?

Yeah, and that's not something to emulate. And if so, it sort of already exists in the spec: iframe.

I’m not sure how it could possibly make the problem worse if the problem is already endemic to modern websites in a form far more heavily used than that ever would be.

Wouldn't that just ends up re-inventing XML and <xsl:include> ?

It is - it is called frames.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com