Re: Including files

Rainer Klute ([email protected])
Thu, 09 Jun 1994 14:31:44 +0200

>> >One extension to HTML that I think would be very usefule would be a
>> >generalisation of the <img src="URL"> markup. Ideally I would like a marku
p
>> >which would allow the inclusion of any file type e.g. <include src="URL">.
>
>> For handling on the client end, things get more complicated. The core
>> issue is: what does it mean to "include" a document of type X into an HTML
>
>> Is this meaningful? What does mean to have more than one [pick your favorit
e
>> construct] in an HTML document?
>
>Whatever would happen when you created a single HTML document should happen
>when you include subdocuments. This means that its up to the user to write
>"partial" HTML documents and/or the browser could ignore the second HEAD pair
>(if everyone used HEAD) and just ignore the BODY. Since the latter probably
>isn't DTD compliant, its up to the user to make sure the document looks right.

It's far more complicated. (But that shouldn't prevent us from
specifying and implementing it.) The general case is to include
only part of the document, for example just a single paragraph from
someone else's larger work. Or even the whole document - which
would in this case mean the <BODY> element, but without the <BODY>
tags. We first need to have a specification on how to reference a
certain part of a document and second have servers being able to
extract the referenced part from the HTML file and put it on the
wire.

>> If the included document is some other type, what does it mean to include
>> it? What if I include a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet document--what does
>> that look like?
>
>Again, if the browser has external viewer support, just run the viewer.

No, that's not the same. The Excel spreadsheet should appear right
in the browser's window, inline with the surrounding text. The idea
is to inline not only GIF images, HTML text or any other document
type, but also *objects* which perform their duty somewhere remote.

Best regards
Rainer Klute

Dipl.-Inform. IRB - immer richtig beraten
Rainer Klute EXUG - European X User Group
Universitdt Dortmund, IRB
D-44221 Dortmund Tel.: +49 231 755-4663

<http://www.informatik.uni-dortmund.de/~klute/>