Re: Including files

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@hal.com)
Thu, 09 Jun 1994 16:31:55 -0500


In message <9406091552.AA24752@ebt-inc.ebt.com>, Gavin Nicol writes:
>Lewis Foti writes:
>
>>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 markup
>>which would allow the inclusion of any file type e.g. <include src="URL">.
>
>Well, one could do this, or one could support the SGML facility
>already defined...

Would you care to elaborate? I've looked at using SGML text entities
in this regard, and I've never come up with a workable proposal.

How do you represent entity structure across the wire? Send SDIF
across? Or do you have to do multiple transactions to get the various
entites?

I'd be interested to see a complete proposal for integrating the SGML
entity manager into the WWW distributed system. I expect it will
happen eventually, but we need specifics to get started.

But really, I don't think the SGML entity manager is a good solution
to the various problems such as aggregating multi-node documents for
printing, etc. I think HyTime abstractions _are_ sufficiently powerful,
and if I ever get out from under this HTML 2.0 review mess, I'll write
it all up.

Dan