Comments on: Don’t use client side includes!

By: Levi Senft

Levi Senft — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 04:48:30 +0000

We use Client Side Includes for mock-ups to show clients interaction on user interface projects or how a design is going to work in a browser. Then when we go into production we replace the CSIs with the final code, SSIs or a templating engine. If you want to check our CSI engine out I posted it here:

jsInclude

By: davidjmedlock

davidjmedlock — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

Excellent advice, Simon. It’s an interesting concept, but from my point of view, all together useless. You’re very right about web servers being able to very easily handle includes. The performance difference will likely go unnoticed by the vast majority of users, no matter what server side language you employ.

By: Rynoguill

Rynoguill — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

here here, i completely agree. i actually try to do everything i possibly can without js

By: mr_jeep

mr_jeep — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

Yep, I agree too. Javascript should never be part of the functionality. I mean a website sould work without javascript,

By: Jeremy Dunck

Jeremy Dunck — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

Hey, I like JS includes quite a lot. I mean, who wants scary spiders crawling about your site internals?

And who needs to be accessible to non-JS browsers? That 20% of business is -so- over-rated.

And who wants to deal with that scary gzip response encoding? People would have to get a real web server to deal with that mess.

...But seriously, you -could- send back a non-JS response to search engine bots.

I tried to talk my coworkers into using, you know, HTTP to handle bandwidth issues, but my work's site sends back non-JS includes, but checks to see if JS is enabled and sends back that fact as a parameter. The server then starts sending JS includes to a browser that can handle it.

Much more complicated that gzipping, though.

By: xhtmlcoder

xhtmlcoder — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

I think they must be slightly crazy to use Client-Side over Server-Side Inclusion for standard headers and footers.

By: asp_funda

asp_funda — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

Ditto!!
JavaScript includes are too bothersome & most of the times result in complications that are not worth bothering on.

By: ajdevies

ajdevies — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

“And who needs to be accessible to non-JS browsers? That 20% of business is -so- over-rated.”
Posted by: Jeremy Dunck @ 9:48 PM MDT

That 20% currently represents a significant source of buying power which will continue to grow as baby-boomers age, lose eye-sight, manual dexterity, etc. Mr. Dunck is out-of-touch with societal and statistical trends.

As a person with multiple disabilities, I personally find this level of insensitivity offensive and inexcusable. I dare Mr. Dunck to spend one day of his life as I spend, and will continue to spend, the rest of my life.

There is also a little thing called “discrimination” against persons with disabilities. It is codified in the United States under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Look it up at http://www.ada.gov.

Accessibility is not about sheer numbers, it is about doing the “right” thing on a voluntary basis in the open market in order to gain/maintain marketshare and goodwill.

Yes, it costs a little more and takes more time to implement, but until you really, really need it, you cannot and will not understand its true value.

By: Not too serious

Not too serious — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

He was kidding about the 20%.

By: Skunk

Skunk — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

ajdevies, he was being saracastic throughout his whole comment. I’m sure no offense was meant - I’ve met Jeremy and he is a huge advocate of best practises in web development, which includes accessibility.