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.