5 ms·
I think they meant that from a vanilla HTML standpoint
by Gualdrapo 10mo ago
I think they meant that from a vanilla HTML standpoint
- alehlopeh 10mo agoHTML frames let you do this way back in the day
- pimlottc 10mo agoThe article mentions that in the very next sentence > You either copied and pasted your header into every single HTML file (and god help you if you needed to change it), or you used <iframe> to embed shared elements. Neither option was great.
- bigstrat2003 10mo agoSure, but later in the article it says that when PHP came out it solved the problem of not being able to do includes. Which again... server-side includes predate PHP. I think that this is just an error in the article any way you slice it. I assume it was just an oversight, as the author has been around long enough that he almost certainly knows about SSI.
- rzzzt 10mo agoPHP's initial release announcement mentions includes as a feature that can be used even if the server does not have SSI support: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi/c/PyJ25gZ6z7A/m/M9FkTUVDfcwJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.c...
- 1718627440 10mo agoDoes it, other than using PHP? To me it sounds like that feature to use instead of SSI is PHP.
- rzzzt 10mo agoI meant the "include" statement of PHP which you can use even if your HTTP server is not configured for processing SSI directives.
- 1718627440 10mo agoBut the HTTP server needs to be configured for PHP and were are discussing the situation pre-PHP.
- NathanOsullivan 10mo agoI am off similar vintage to the author. I have no idea when Apache first supported SSI , but personally I never knew it existed until years after PHP became popular. I would guess , assuming that `Options +Includes` cannot be done by unprincipled users, that this being a disabled-by-default feature it was inaccessible to majority of us.
- hdgvhicv 10mo agoArchive.org tells me I was using SSI in Jan 1997. I didn’t really understand what I was doing, but including the footer and a visitor counter via an exec one which I presumably copied from somewhere else. At the time I was still on windows and had no real concept of a program being executed as a cgi or ssi, it was all “copy this from Matt’s script archive to your cgi-bin directory” My shared hosting from claranet supported ssi via a .htaccess configuration. Technically php was around at that point, but I don’t think it became popular until php3 - certainly my hosting provider didn’t support it until then.
- rzzzt 10mo agoI have also dug around a bit to find out this one, and the earliest httpd I could get my hands on is 1.3.0 which is hosted on the Apache archive site: https://archive.apache.org/dist/httpd/ https://archive.apache.org/dist/httpd/ "src/modules/standard/mod_include.c" says: /* * http_include.c: Handles the server-parsed HTML documents * * Original by Rob McCool; substantial fixups by David Robinson; * incorporated into the Apache module framework by rst. * */ Rob McCool is the author of NCSA HTTPd so it seems there is direct lineage wrt. this feature between the two server implementations.
- 1718627440 10mo agoIf they insist on only using vanilla HTML then the problem is unsolved to this day. I think it is actually less solved now, since back then HTML was an SGML application, so you could supply another DTD and have macro-expansion on the client.
- mixmastamyk 10mo agoObject tag can do it. iframe also with limitations.
- 1718627440 10mo agoDoes it really? I think, this makes you have a wrapper and I am not sure if you can get rid of all issues with "display: contents". Also you are already in the body, so you can't change the head, which makes it useless for the most idiomatic usecase for that feature.
- mixmastamyk 10mo agoGets you header, footer, components. Most of head would be nice but you typically want a custom title for example.