I want to create some html help pages, separate html pages.
However, I want to have the same content on the top and bottom of the pages.
In the past I've used PHP or ASP, with header and footer files.
I've then had to do view source and save these pages to get what I want.
I just wondered if there an easiest way to do this ?
EDIT:
The pages are for use with software using a web object not a normal browser. So there won't be a web server
If your web server supports it, you could do server side includes
You could use frames, but it's not necessarily advisable (for one, it breaks navigation).
You could use XML files with an XSLT stylesheet to turn them into HTML documents that share similar elements.
You could use PHP or another server-side language to generate the pages, and then use a recursive download tool (such as wget) to turn them into HTML.
EDIT: you're basically asking whether the "standard-ish" subset of HTML supported by your component of choice provides a way of including data from a common file, just so you won't have to include the data in every HTML document.
The answer hovers somewhere between "no way" and "maybe your component has a few tricks to do that".
The sane thing to do here would be to have a tool generate the HTML documents from a common template. Could be XML + XSLT, PHP/ASP/whatever, or a fully-fledged CMS (this actually helps let non-technical users write the document contents).
It's awful, but you could include a JS file that uses a bunch of document.write("...") to include common elements. Not SEO friendly.
Related
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.
What are the most common options for templating HTML files for static pages, to minimize maintenance and redundancy? An example of my question would be Adobe Dreamweaver.
Consider using a server-side scripting language such as PHP or ASP.NET. These produce dynamically built web-pages meaning that you can code it in such a way that headers/footers etc are separate from the main content, meaning you change that link once rather than 30 times.
If server-side scripting is not an option, I'd suggest having a look at Dreamweaver. This will enable you to create templates, and then create pages based on those templates. When you modify that link in the template, all pages that use that template will be updated. This will give you what you want without the server-side scripting.
why dont you use iframe inside ? ( which will contain a single navigation html page...)?
If you're using a server-side language like PHP, you can start to use the include function. So you'll include in a different file your navigation bar and then include it in every file of your website. Thus, every change to the navigation bar file will affect all the others files.
If you are writing only static pages, it isn't possible. Maybe you can try SSI.
Typically you need either a fancy program (like Dreamweaver and its templates functionality) or some sort of server-side scripting. Languages like php, asp, etc might be a bit much if the only thing you are looking to do is as you describe, so I might look into seeing if your server support server side includes (SSI).
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.
If you use dynamic pages like JSP or asp.net, you can have your page template included, and then content added. But what if you have no server-side component and all pages are just HTML/JS? You can of course create a template then copy it for each page, but then if you want to change something you risk having to modify every page, even if you put most styling in CSS properly.
Are there any non-awful ways to do this? I could see that an iframe could be used to load the content into the central page but that sounds nasty. Does HTML provide any way to include a base file and add to it?
You can use Server Side Includes to include other files on the server. It's similar to scripting languages like ASP or php, but SSI is usually supported by the server directly, so it's available on many servers, even if there is scripting language available.
The answer is still templates. Just process them offline instead of on the server. I like to use ttree for this.
You can create the pages offline and render into HTML, and deploy those to the site.
One option might be: https://github.com/thewml but it does feel ... "too much". I also saw asciidoc for creating sites ( https://asciidoc.org/ ) and I also used several times doxygen for that ( http://www.doxygen.nl/ ).
I also saw CMS that create static HTML files, but hey are no longer maintained.
I am creating some static html pages outside a .net and outside a ruby-on-rails environment.
I created a menu I want to share between several pages, but I'm wondering how this is done using regular html constructs (i.e. without .net's master pages and without rail's layouts)
Is there a way to do this without cutting and pasting?
What web server are you using? It's likely you'll have to enable Server Side Includes in order to use:
Save the HTML for the common elements of your site as separate files. For example, your navigation section might be saved as navigation.html or navigation.ssi.
Use the following SSI tag to include that HTML in each page.
<!--#include virtual="path to file/include-file.html" -->
Use that same code on every page that you want to include the file.
Reference: http://webdesign.about.com/od/ssi/a/aa052002a.htm
To share common HTML snippets between pages, you'll need some sort of server-side "code".
The simplest thing you could do that I know if would be Server Side Includes, "SSI"
see: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/ssi.html#includingastandardfooter
There are basically two options: frames (or iframes) or javascript. Frames come with a whole host of problems and I really don't recommend you go down this route. Have a look at PURE javascript library for clean and simple client-side templating.