Isnt it weird there is no standards-based declarative way to put a chunk of HTML inside other HTM

October 20, 2022

Part of Douglas Bowman’s 20-year retrospective on what is considered to be one of the first major standard-based (no tables, CSS in tow) commercial websites:

In HotWired’s early days, many of the network’s pages were coded by hand as static HTML. A simple update to the navigation meant using a text editor’s search/replace function across hundreds of files. But as the engineering team progressed, they took advantage of server-side includes for common components, and crude frameworks that could be considered early content management systems began to emerge.

We needed HTML includes 20 years ago! And we definitely still do. I’m well aware there are tons of ways to accomplish it, it just seems like web standards would have plucked that one off long ago.

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