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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

I wish this functionality was part of standard HTML.

Indeed, xinclude would be great. Combine that with an HTML-based and declarative web-component solution and it would go a long way to reducing the need for scripting on basic websites.

You mostly just described XSL. There's a ton of templating XSL can do "for free" in the browser with no JavaScript.

Sure, but it's about as far from user/dev friendly as it gets. I recently had to make a standalone FAQ-style page and got the idea to use XSL to render it from an XML file (since you can teach any semi-literate person how to write XML in like 5 minutes). Firstly, XSL is so much weirder than any templating engine we're used to, that it took me stupidly long to do the most basic things. Then it turns out, browsers don't include default styles in XSL-rendered documents (no headings, no lists, nothing!), so I had to style it completely from scratch.

Everything in the XML "ecosystem" (XSL, XPath, XDT, SOAP) is so unfriendly that I'm no longer surprised everyone is reinventing these concepts in (unfortunately) JSON these days.

XSD (XML Schema Definition) is pretty good though, and it makes autocomplete and spotting errors when hand-writing XML files very easy.

I’ve messed around with generating SVG classes in python and C++ using the XSD schema and while it is pretty good it falls flat on its face for anything complicated like SVG.

Resorted to using the DTD schema as it can support complex things (and that’s what they use for the probably never to be released updated version) through some python hackery to generate a hundred or more classes that takes forever to compile and, strangely enough, actually does what its supposed to do which is represent SVG as a bunch of classes with reading/writing to xml.

I was going through a phase and tried that with rss but it was more hassle than it was worth.

—edit—

Should add the DTD makes things like enums for tags or whatever simple so you can have typed values and property formed xml documents — can’t remember if I ever managed to get that working with the XSD.

Yes, I was a big fan of XSL. Too bad it didn't catch on.

Frames are the closest thing HTML has to this

Frames trigger bad memories for some older devs for how they were abused but this is really the best way to do it. Doesn't depend on server modules for includes, and even text-mode browsers generally support frames (but many do not support JavaScript).

Except that frames cause issues with bookmarks or linking to specific pages from the outside.

An iframe with some CSS might however work to some degree.

transclusion

Or you could use a frameset

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