Comment by tannhaeuser

Comment by tannhaeuser 9 hours ago

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This is how the simplest variant of SGML (or XML) entities have worked since 1986:

    <!doctype html [
      <!entity e system "e.html">
    ]>
    <html>
      <title>Hello, world!</title>
      <p>The content of e is: &e;</p>
    </html>
HTML was envisioned as an SGML vocabulary from day one. That SGML's document composition and other facilities were used only at authoring time and not directly supported by browsers was merely due to the very early stage of the first browser software ([1]) which directly mentions SGML even, just as HTML specs have presented HTML as a language for authoring and not just delivery since at least version 4.

There really never had been a need or call for browser devs to come up with idiosyncratic and overcomplicated solutions relying on JavaScript for such a simple and uncontroversial facility as a text macro which was part of every document/markup language in existance since the 1960s.

[1]: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/MarkUp.html

the_mitsuhiko 4 hours ago

> This is how the simplest variant of SGML (or XML) entities have worked since 1986:

In theory. In practice not a single browser had an actual SGML parser and that was never supported.

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myfonj 7 hours ago

I wish external entities were enabled in browsers (*), and not entirely disabled, like they are now.

In the OP scenario, it would provide possibility to have header/footer/stylesheet content in separate files and get system working that does not rely on absolute path of the CSS.

(*) Naturally, just with few minimal directory traversal precautions; basically anything like "no ../" and even restriction like "referenced resource filename must begin with referencing XSL filename" would be fine for me.

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