This list of Frequently Asked Questions is maintained by the WDG and was last updated on July 15, 2000. HTML itself offers no way to seamlessly incorporate the content of one file into another. Two popular ways of including the contents of one file seamlessly into another for the WWW are preprocessing and server-side inclusion . Preprocessing techniques include the C preprocessor and other generic text manipulation methods, and several HTML-specific processors.
Processing occurs at the time the documents are actually retrieved.
The whole directive gets replaced by the contents of the specified file. In theory these representations are equally valid. In practice, authoring convenience and limited support by browsers complicate the issue. Browser support for coded characters may depend on configuration and font resources. Unicode numeric character references, but browser support is generally poor.