[whatwg] <include> element

[Christian Schmidt]

Jonas Sicking wrote:
> The idea is basically an element like <iframe> but that renders the
> linked page, instead of inside a square area, in flow with the main
> page.
This is actually useful not only in Ajax-like applications like the ones 
suggested in your example but also in more static pages as a replacement 
for server-side includes. Client-side includes make it easier to make 
sites that are made up data from different sources. Most developers 
prefer to avoid server-site includes in favour of letting clients 
request the resource directly.

Some sites may choose to serve the top-level navigation from one central 
place, even though the site is made up of several subsites hosted on 
different servers and platforms by different hosting companies. The 
<include> element could be used to include the top-level navigation on 
each of the subsites. Also, content from different subsites could be 
aggregated on one overview page using <include>.

Ad banners are usually served from a seperate server. Banners with fixed 
proportions are probably better served using an IFRAME, but e.g. 
Google's text-ads may vary in size and could benefit from being a part 
of the page.

In practice, the result effect is often achieved by wrapping your 
include file in a document.write() and including this using script a 
<script src="...">. However, this makes it harder to write these 
includes by hand (you have to escape certain characters, ' " \ \n \r 
\t), and debugging also gets more difficult.


Christian