Posted by Spartanicus on 11/17/05 17:54

Hans Dietmar Jaeger <jagger@jaggger.de> wrote:

>>> Have a look at http://www.tcs.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/~hdjaeger/
>>
>> That is a misguided usage of embedding. It looks to me that what you
>> are really after is *inclusion* of common content into various pages.
>
>But why it is not intended? What is the reason?

Unless you have a very good reason for it you should not use coding that
causes a new viewport to open inside another document. It causes
problems for you the author since what is rendered inside that new
viewport is completely independent from the document in which it is
embedded. For example clicking links inside such a new viewport normally
causes them to open inside that viewport, not in the main viewport.
Anything rendered inside the new viewport needs to be styled separately
etc.

It also causes problems for the user, manipulating in document viewports
causes usability problems.

Use inclusion* if you want to include a code fragment. That way the code
fragment becomes an integrated part of the document in which it is
included, without any of the drawbacks of opening a new viewport.

>I store the common
>content in only ONE place (to avoid redundant data), save disk space

What you are including measures a few hundred bytes. You'll likely lose
more disc space due to your file system's inefficiency with small files.

>and
>there is an easy maintenance (you can't forget one file because the
>latest version is automatically imported).

Changing one file or changing one code fragment across multiple files
shouldn't require any more work.

>What should be the intantion to allow type="text/html"?

>> The simplest way to do that is to do a S&R across various files using
>> an editor that has a proper multi line S&R.
>
>= data redundancy (s. a.)! And why working on several fully identical
>files instead of one centrlized one?
>
>> Alternatively you could consider using a preprocessor, or (worse) a
>> server side inclusion method.
>
>My provider provides no server side inclusion in my package.

So use one of the preferred suggested methods, site wide S&R or a
preprocessor.

* To distinguish between what are two fundamentally different processes
I use the phrase "embedding" to refer to opening a new viewport inside
an existing document, and "inclusion" to refer to incorporating a code
fragment into another document. In the wild both phrases are used
interchangeably, for example the HTML spec refers to the <object>
element as "general inclusion".

--
Spartanicus

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