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Thanks for these suggestions! The details of our requirements are still being determined, but I expect it will involve placing the same js-powered navbar on multiple sites hosted on different servers with varying degrees of access, from entirely in-house to entirely hosted with some ability to customize. I think plan A will be to pull in js using CORS and/or JSONP. Meanwhile I will resign myself to an eternity of wondering what thread my brain managed to warp onto this topic. Best, Anna On Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 9:12 PM, Joe Hourcle <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > On Jan 10, 2015, at 8:37 PM, Jason Bengtson wrote: > > > Do you have access to the server-side? Server side scripting languages > (and > > the frameworks and CMSes built with them) have provisions for just this > > sort of thing. Include statements in PHP and cfinclude tags in > coldfusion, > > for example. Every Content Management System I've used has had a > provision > > to create reusable content that can be added to multiple pages as blocks > or > > via shortcodes. If you can use server-side script I recommend it; that's > > really the cleaner way to do this sort of thing. Another option you could > > use that avoids something like iframes is to create a javascript file > that > > dynamically creates the navbar dynamically in your pages. Just include > the > > javascript file in any page you want the toolbar to appear in. That > method > > adds some overhead to your pages, but it's perfectly workable if > > server-side script is out of reach. > > > The javascript trick works pretty well when you have people > mirroring your site via wget (as they won't run the js, and > thus won't try to retrieve all of the images that are used > to make the page pretty every time they run their mirror job. > > You can see it in action at: > > http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/data/ins_data/ > > The drawback is that some browsers have a bit of a flash > when they first hit the page. It might be possible to > mitigate the problem by having the HTML set the background > to whatever color the background will be changed to, but I > don't quite the flexibility to do that in my case, due to > how the page is being generated. > > -Joe > > ps. It's been years since I've done ColdFusion, but I > remember there being a file that you could set, that would > automatically getting inserted into every page in that > directory, or in sub-directories. I want to say it was > often used for authentication and such, but it might be > possible to use for this. If nothing else, you could load > header into a variable, and have the pages just print the > variable in the right location. >