Re: Re: Equivalent of PHP include

Tim Churches <[email protected]> Tue, 17 Feb 2004 14:44:51 +1100
Newsgroups gmane.comp.web.albatross.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Andrew McNamara <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> >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.
> 
> You're not missing something - Albatross doesn't do this.
> 
> I wonder what PHP is doing? It's not a trivial exercise to include
> the
> content of another page without breaking the rules of HTML - strictly
> speaking, it should be stripping off the enclosing <HTML>, <BODY>,
> etc elements (and even this might not be enough).

You're assuming that the referenced URL points to a complete HTML page. The 
URL may point to just a snippet of dynamically generated HTML, or to a GIF or 
PNG graphic, also possibly dynamically generated by a Web service elsewhere.

Tim C