You will probably have observed that every entry in ongoing has the same material on the right side of your screen, the little homilies on Truth and Business and so on. Why can't I store them and serve them just once?
In fact, the program that generates the pages computes this text, stores it away in a global variable, and there are various places where it says:
print $html $topRight;
This is wasteful and stupid and it means I have to regenerate every page on the site every time I change a word in one of the homilies. XML has a thing called an "External Parsed Entity", and the W3C has another thing called "XInclude", both of these would solve the problem but none of them are really out there in the field yet.
We already expect that a "Web Page" will include lots of different graphical objects, why shouldn't it also include lots of different textual objects?
Or I guess I could use a real publishing engine with run-time includes for inserting the boilerplate material into the output stream. Yes, except for every publishing engine in the world has its own way of doing this, and wouldn't it be better if there were a standardized way?
