Reusing content
On many Web sites—especially large ones—identical content areas are often repeated on many pages. For example, you might have a set of pages that all share the same navigation bar at the top and “boilerplate” copyright text at the bottom of each page. Although such areas of common content may not be difficult to replicate across many documents in the first place, it can be difficult to update every page when you make a change to the common content. Fortunately, there are ways to make it easier to update common content across multiple documents. The basic idea is to reuse content stored in a single source in multiple pages, rather than copying content to multiple documents.
Namo WebEditor supports three methods of reusing content in this way:
- You can put shared content in an ordinary HTML document and insert inline frames in other documents to display that content. An inline frame is like a “window” in one document through which another document shows.
- You can use a server-sside include—a special command in a document that instructs the Web server to insert the contents of another document at the location of the command in the document’s source code. (Other SSI commands can be used to insert other items besides documents.)
- You can register a block of content in one document as a shared content block and then insert the shared block in other documents. Documents that contain shared content blocks actually contain copies of the shared content, but Namo WebEditor updates the copies for you when you use the Update Shared Content Blocks command.