Christian Schmidt wrote:
Jonas Sicking wrote:
The idea is basically an element like <iframe> but that renders the
linked page, instead of inside a square area, in flow with the main
page.
This is actually useful not only in Ajax-like applications like the ones
suggested in your example but also in more static pages as a replacement
for server-side includes. Client-side includes make it easier to make
sites that are made up data from different sources. Most developers
prefer to avoid server-site includes in favour of letting clients
request the resource directly.
Some sites may choose to serve the top-level navigation from one central
place, even though the site is made up of several subsites hosted on
different servers and platforms by different hosting companies. The
<include> element could be used to include the top-level navigation on
each of the subsites. Also, content from different subsites could be
aggregated on one overview page using <include>.
Ad banners are usually served from a seperate server. Banners with fixed
proportions are probably better served using an IFRAME, but e.g.
Google's text-ads may vary in size and could benefit from being a part
of the page.
Note that for security reasons we can't allow the <include> to point to
servers other than that of the including page. Otherwise it would be
possible to pull information out of documents on another server by using
a fragment identifier. For example, the following could be used to see
how many bank transactions a user has done in the past month:
<include src="http://citibank.com/cgi/transactions.phptranstable";>
obviously that is a made up url, but you get the general idea.
It is possible that we could overcome this using the access control
specification, but I haven't looked into if that would actually work.
/ jonas
