Posted by Wyngs on 11/01/07 23:51

Andy Dingley wrote:

> On 31 Oct, 03:50, Glenn Christensen <glen...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> > Is there any way to use a web page as a background to another web page?
>
> Yes, loads of them. I'm not sure I'd recommend any of them though.
>
> What you're literally talking about here (by using terms like
> "background") is client-side assembly of a rendered bitmap image.
> That's not a good end-result to aim at: it dumps the semantics of text
> web documents in favour of pictures, it's inaccessible, and it relies
> on the real-time availability of other peoples' servers.
>
> A much better way to do this broad topic of "aggregating content" is
> to use server-side processing and to produce final web document that's
> still a web document, not just a picture of one. This is standard
> aggregation technology these days - use Atom or RSS, either is _far_
> easier than trying to scrpae HTML form other sites.
>
> Agggregation also permits caching, so you're not hitting other
> peoples' bandwidth so heavily, and you're not so dependent on their
> server reliability.
>
> If you want aggregated content as a "background", then SSI to a <div>,
> or indeed directly into <iframe> works. Use z-index to control
> "layering".
>
> If you really want to, you can render the content to a bitmap (or
> aggregate a bitmap) and then use background-image on your page. This
> is very easy, but it has the limitations described above. It would all
> depend on what you're after - a "browser wallpaper of the day" service
> might be cute.
>
Many thanks, Andy. I had to print that out for later reference.
Obviously, I have to find out what this layering is all about before I
go further.

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