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.
>