Say I want a web site with about 20 different pages. How should I go about building it so I can have the same content like a navbar and footer across all pages without having to copy and paste edits into each and every html file when something changes?
edit: I'm basically trying to figure out how to do Jade's include without installing Jade
That depends entirely on how you build it. If you are using a content management system (such as WordPress or Joomla) this is the inherent behavior. Header/footer content, and other areas depending on your use of widgets, etc. will automatically display the same content on every page. This content is easy to update site-wide in one location. Content management systems excel in this area.
If you are building the site from static files, and you are using a scripting language of some kind (such as PHP, ASP, etc) the use of includes would be a good option. Simply call the repeated block of code wherever you'd like to insert it on each page.
For example, if using PHP, you have a file that contains your legal text in the footer called footer_legal.php. Anytime you wished to include this content, you simply add the line include('footer_legal.php'); and the insertion happens.
What you're referring to is called templating and bootstrapping. There are various templating engines out there. It also depends on which server-side language you're running, as others said you maybe running PHP, NodeJS, C or something else, depends on your choice. The essential part is that you'll have separate files called templates (eg. .HTML, .EJS, .PHP, etc) for each element that repeats across different pages ( footer, header, content) and then you call that template where you want it.
Related
I started creating web pages in plain HTML. I have a header, main content and a footer. The main content is divided into two, left and right content. Everything is the same on all pages except for the right content. Now I have about 15 pages. This is very tiresome if I make some changes on the other static pages (header, footer and left side content) as I have to go through all pages.
How can I create one HTML file for each static area and how am I going to integrate it?
There are, essentially, three places you can do this:
At build time. Run a script that puts the pages together and outputs static HTML. Then upload the static HTML to the server. Back in 2013 I recommended ttree, but these days static site builders are common and more powerful. My projects tend towards Gatsby (for complex projects) and Metalsmith (for simpler ones). Jekyll is very popular (and Github provides documentation for using it with GH Pages).
At runtime on the server. This could be a simple SSI, a PHP include or a full template system (of which there are many, including Template Toolkit and mustache), possibly running inside an MVC framework (such as Catalyst or Django). This is the most common approach, it has less time between making a change and putting the result life then doing the templating at build time.
At runtime on the client. This adds a dependency on client-side JavaScript (which can be fragile and unfriendly to search engines), so I wouldn't recommend it unless you already had a server-side or build-time solution in place. Gatsby, for example, is a static site generator that builds a React frontend backed by static pages.
There are a couple of ways to do this.
If you are working purely with HTML, then you can use a 'server side include' -- this is a tag which allows you to load a file into the page (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes). Whoever is hosting your website has to support this.
<!--#include virtual="../quote.txt" -->
If youe web host happen to use PHP, you can do this using the include method (see http://php.net/manual/en/function.include.php):
<?php include('path_to_file/file.htm');?>
This will include the file at the point you place the tag. But again, whoever is hosting your site needs to support this.
There are other methods of doing this, bit these are the two I make use of.
Well... what you’re looking for is called "Master Page" and unfortunately it isn’t available in html however you can use the <iframe> tag but it would make your website look really ugly. i would suggest you to use a programming language such as PHP its much easier that way.
but if you want to use <iframe> then They’ll load remote pages into your website, so you could define a "Master Page" like this:
<body>
<div id="content">
<iframe src="content1.html"></iframe>
Now, inside of content1.html, you could just write the content without the main layout
I am converting mockups to HTML + CSS. Then this will be used as a template for a PHP system by other people (actually it can be any server side language, PHP is not important)
There are, for example, 10 different type of pages. But in each page, many blocks can differ in many cases. For example a block can be displayed differently for anonymous and logged in users. But I dont want to copy the whole html file and just change that block and have another html file. I know php can be written to include parts of the page from many files. But there is no php yet in my design workflow, and I want to have full HTML design before ever passing the files to PHP guys.
Basically, what I want is a "CASCADED" html structure for design purposes. So in a "container" html file, I can include all the different parts from different HTML files.
Does anyone know a method / tool / process to design dynamic pages?
I can think of two ways of accomplishing this. First pull in each of the various components on the page with ajax calls, jquery will make this relatively easy.
Or if you don't want to use javascript then iframes. But the iframes method is extremely prone to buggyness and in some layouts just will not work. Also keep in mind that since you aren't directly injecting html into the page each page would have to keep track of its own styles.
If I update the code on my CSS stylesheet, all pages that pull the code from that sheet will be updated with the adjustments made. Is there a way to do this with actual information that can be viewed a web page(s)? I want to make changes on one page and have all desired pages adjusted.
can anyone push me in the right direction or direct me to which tags I would use?
Thank you
There are several ways to do this, although none quite like CSS.
Server Side Code
This includes languages like ASP.NET, PHP, Ruby, and many others. Using server side code, you can create content areas that are usually controlled by a database (MySQL is a free database). When you store your content in a database, you can then pull that content out via server side code and place it on the page.
AJAX
AJAX is a relatively new method that also usually leverages the use of a database. Basically, when you need content, you send a call to your server (or database) via Javascript and it responds with the content you requested. You can then format the content how you wish. There are literally thousands of questions on StackOverflow about how to use AJAX. Most of them will reference jQuery.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
While this is similar to the first two methods I listed (in that they usually leverage one or both methods) CMSs are different because they abstract the need to actually do any of the work yourself. They are usually pre-built systems where you just plug in your content and make some tweaks and you're good to go. Some examples of CMSs are Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal.
jQuery.load()
If you get into jQuery at all, there is an easy method you could use to kind of replicate what you're trying to accomplish (one file that controls all your content). While it is definitely not the most highly-recommended method, so long as your site is not too big, it could work nicely. Basically you would put all your content into an .html file and separate them into divs with ids. Then to pull content from that file, you would use jQuery.load() plus the page fragments option (scroll down a bit on the jQuery.load() page) to pull in the desired content. Again, this is not really how I would go about doing it, but it is an option for a small bit of content you want to quickly change on the fly without incurring the overhead of setting up and maintaining a database.
If I understand you correctly, you want to apply the ideas of CSS (provide some handy definitions, use them everywhere) to "the rest of the HTML code".
If you are on a web server, you can do that using one of these technologies:
Server Side Includes
PHP
JSP
and probably many more that allow external file inclusion.
Sounds like you need either server-side includes or JavaScript AJAX loading.
If it's just the tag that you only want to know, then there are only two available tags (or markup) to call JavaScript codes. It's either:
Inline: <script> ... code goes here ... </script>
External: <script src="filepath.js"></script>.
But if you are dealing with XHTML, then you have to include a CDATA between the <script> and </script>, e.g. <script><![CDATA[ ... inline code goes here ... ]]></script>.
However, if that doesn't answer your question, then a tag is not what you need, but JavaScript codes.
I'm building a small-scale website (a personal one) in which each page would have the same set of header elements (I'm not talking about the <head> element). In other words, I want each page to have essentially the same title at the top of the page and the same navigation bar below that (with possibly minor differences in each page). It's kind of like how StackOverflow has that navigation bar (with the logo, and the Questions, Tags, etc. buttons) on the top of every page.
Is it possible create such a header for every web page without copying and pasting the HTML code to do so? I really don't want to run into a situation where if I want to make a single change, I would have to change all of my pages containing the header.
Real web sites use real web frameworks, which have a concept called a "layout" (at least that's what they're called in Rails; as mentioned in Uwe's answer, they're called master pages in ASP.NET). All the common "templatey" stuff goes into a layout.
How about include files in a server-side language like PHP or master pages in ASP.NET?
You need to use some kind of dynamic page processing, whether it's PHP, a server-side include, or a similar tool.
If you need to stick with straight HTML, you could try to rig something up with AJAX or JavaScript - but then you highly limiting your website's functionality, giving it serious performance issues, AND preventing users who have JavaScript disabled from using your website.
A third answer is to use some sort of pre-deployment tool. This used to be a bigger market, but I think it's mostly dried up now. Here's an example for using DreamWeaver to handle this.
If you have a PHP server that supports PHP,
<?php include 'header_inc.php'; ?>
If that's not available
<!--#include virtual="header_inc.html" -->
But whether this works or not is server dependent
If you have a server with PHP capabilities
include 'header.inc.php';
you must put the header code in a file named that and then put that include code in all pages that you want the header to show up on
I still don't feel comfortable repeating HTML for things like menu code, header, footer and most importantly a quick links/news panel on each page. Also it seems a little inefficient to keep sending the same repeated html for each page.
For the moment I have written a small program which reads these sections from my index.htm and replaces the relevant sections within all other pages in that directory. However things have started to get considerably more awkward now that I have extra pages like a Message Forum and Image Gallery, both of which require their own index.htm in their respective sub directories.
So the question is should I be using object, iframe or SSI?
Has anyone successfully used the object tag to embed a separate HTML file within a page? SSI would do the job except that the repeated HTML is still being sent across the web on every page change and different include lines would have to be used on the PHP pages. What about using IFrames, I know they are not strict XHTML1.0 compliant but I seem to recall rumors that they are going to br supported in HTML5 again, does that make them a good bet for the future?
The easiest way to solve this problem is by using a scripting language (PHP, Python, ASP) and templates. You can create the basic structure for your site in a master template, then use the scripts to pull in only the content that changes.
For a particularly good example, see Django's template system.
Each of your pages could call a JavaScript function in an external boilerplate.js file. That function could add boilerplate elements to the page, using the DOM.
That said, you might not want to do this, nor use IFrames, for SEO reasons! (Also, your pages would not fail gracefully if the client disabled JavaScript.)
To me it seems better to have a more search-engine-friendly page and put up with the transmission of duplicate markup. Server Side Includes (or any server-side scripting language) would give these qualities while also making it easy for you to change the boilerplate on all pages at once.