Re: Including files

Brian Behlendorf (brian@wired.com)
Thu, 9 Jun 1994 10:54:11 +0000 (GMT)


On Thu, 9 Jun 1994, Lewis Foti wrote:
> On Jun 9, 8:34am, Rainer Klute wrote:
> > It's far more complicated. (But that shouldn't prevent us from
> > specifying and implementing it.) The general case is to include
> > only part of the document, for example just a single paragraph from
> > someone else's larger work. Or even the whole document - which
> > would in this case mean the <BODY> element, but without the <BODY>
> > tags. We first need to have a specification on how to reference a
> > certain part of a document and second have servers being able to
> > extract the referenced part from the HTML file and put it on the
> > wire.
>
> This is a more complicated approach than I think is warrented. Including only
> part of an original document (that had not been intended for inclusion) is a
> far more general problem. I'm not sure that including part of a document is
> meaningful, what do you expect to see if you include bytes 104255 to 122351
> from a gif file?

Just limiting it to HTML docs for now, it'd be relatively easy to reference
and obtain only parts of documents via the <a name=""> anchor. I for one
though would have to use the name tag differently - right now I use it
to signify the beginning of a part from a multi-part document, whereas
instead it should contain the entire part itself. For example:

Right now in http://www.wired.com/Etext/1.3/departments/street.cred.html:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

<h2><a name="vending">Internet Vending Machines</a></h2>

In the mid-1970s some brilliant student at Carnegie Mellon University got
tired of trudging down many flights of stairs from his computer terminal
to get a soda from a basement vending machine. By some law of the
universe, the machine was always out of his favorite variety whenever he
was most thirsty. So he hacked up a network connection to the vending
contraption. Now, before he made the long trip down, he would e-mail it to
see which sodas were available.

(more)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

should be instead:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

<a name="vending">
<h2>Internet Vending Machines</h2>

In the mid-1970s some brilliant student at Carnegie Mellon University got
tired of trudging down many flights of stairs from his computer terminal
to get a soda from a basement vending machine. By some law of the
universe, the machine was always out of his favorite variety whenever he
was most thirsty. So he hacked up a network connection to the vending
contraption. Now, before he made the long trip down, he would e-mail it to
see which sodas were available.

(more)
</a>

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

That way I could easily say <include src="street.cred.html#vending">
and never have to worry about conflicting head or body tags.

> The advantage of the include markup would be that the user would not
> have to click on a link to follow it. Simply openeing the document would
> force the following of the include links.

Also, one could specify "don't follow includes", if they wished.

Brian