Equivalent of PHP include

First question to the list, and probably a really dumb one to boot...

I can't seem to find a simple equivalent to the PHP include directive. 
I want to be able to insert the contents of a specified URL at some 
point in a template, rather like a server side include. This is easy to 
do using 'al-include' for a file but doesn't seem to work for a URL. I 
kludged things by making a copy of the remote data in a local file and 
using 'al-include'. I've also toyed with writing a macro to do this for 
a general URL but it's such a simple thing to want to do I think I'm 
missing something. Any clues appreciated.