> 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 favorite
> 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.
>
> 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. For
example, when reading <include src="stuff.ps"> the browser just fetches the
document then spawns off a postscript viewer. Using the option to ignore
inline images in Mosaic could work the same way here - it could allow only
including text or html and not images or external viewers.
Including from the server side obviously works better for a lot of stuff
(although a lot of caching benefits seem to get lost when it isn't done right).
However, there doesn't seem any reason why includes should be limited to
just gif images.
If you start including subdocuments, or with lots of inline images, you're
back to the need for a multiple GET - one that gets more than one file during
a connection. Has any progress been made on this?
Dave