Date: Fri, 5 May 1995 20:05:36 -0700 From: email@example.com (Steve Abatangle) Message-Id: <9505060305.AA02461@velveeta.harris.com> To: firstname.lastname@example.org Subject: Re: INCLUDE tag > > In my opinion, there is no reason to have an <include> tag in html, > > where the <include> includes another file, combining both files to > > one html file. That will only lead to more network traffic and longer > > display times (since 2 requests have to be made.) You clearly don't understand hypermedia. HTML will not have grown up until it *does* have an <INCLUDE> tag. Network traffic? Longer display times? Worrying about that is hardly a forward-thinking thing to do. The potential of hyper-documents is what is important here. Why hyper-documents? Not because they're neat. Not because they're The Next Big Thing. It's because they work *more like how the human brain works*. The brain does not like to be told what to think next; each human mind works in a different way, and ought to be able to follow its own train of thought. This is why we need <INCLUDE> tags. It's time we thought about the future, as in 5-10 years from now -- not next week. The internet's bandwidth will grow, and the speed of computers will increase. We needn't worry about network traffic or display times. We need to concern ourselves with the future and the maturation of HTML. Steve PS: This "since 2 requests have to be made" thing bugs me, because it's obvious there's a lack of understanding about HTML/HTTP here. Each page generates multiple requests to begin with, if it has images. Each image is a request. That image doesn't have to be at the same site as the page. So many requests are *already* being made; an <INCLUDE> tag wouldn't particularly add any.