[Resolved] Please tell me I don't need XML

tsweezey

Greetings all.

I have an html document on my server that consists of images, text, tables, etc. This file changes periodically.

What I'd like to do is to have remote sites be able to embed this document within their own page. Many of the sites will be the "non-php" Geocities type hosts.

I don't think XML is really a consideration since the format of the document and associated elements don't need to be controlled by the remote site.

So... say I have a document located at http://www.mysite.com/publish/news.html

How would I get this doc to show up within their page? I'm assuming I'd use an href tag, but I'm clueless beyond that.

Any help is appreciated.

Best Regards,

Tim

HalfaBee

You can do this with iframes.

HalfaBee

tsweezey

Thanks HalfaBee for the tip regarding iframes. Unfortunately, I need to embed the html remotely without the scrollbars. The iframes solution does solve another problem I'm having... so special thanks 🙂

What I'm looking for is similar to the remote invocation code from phpAdsNew. When an ad displays, it can show an image and/or text link. In theory, this is very close to what I need.

The difference is that I have multiple images and links. With that said, I was hoping to have the remote site use code similar to the following...

<a href='http://www.mysite.com/feed/news.php?date=today'>

<img src='http://www.mysite.com/feed/news.php?date=today' border='0' alt=''></a>

I was hoping that the "news.php" (or whatever) could somehow call the .html for inclusion remotely.

The thing is that I can write something easily to use the "src" tag to place a simple image. In the phpAdsNew example, they can have a text link below the displayed banner, which leads me to believe that I could pretty much format what I want. i.e. "calling an .html file"

Err... I hope that makes sense.

The phpAdsNew example may not be the best, but I hope it's useful regarding what I'm trying to do.

Am I dreaming?

Thanks a bunch,

Tim

HalfaBee

You can turn the scroll bars off.

HalfaBee

jimson

if i understand you correctly, you want to syndicate the content. am i right?

you can use image way.

so your script will output an image (jpg, gif or whatsoever) whenever user link to it. The image will be the content written by GD.

but users might hate you.

another way is using WDDX. a very simple way to make data or variable into XML like format...

tsweezey

You can turn the scroll bars off.

Yeah, but then you still need to scroll inside the window. It would be perfect if the height changed dynamically with the embedded content. After thinking about things a bit more, the iframes might actually work just fine with the scroll bar.

if i understand you correctly, you want to syndicate the content. am i right?

Yep. But I'm not sure the whole GD thing is appropriate. Basically, say I have three photos, and I want those three photos to show up on the page of my remote site. Then, the next day, I may have 4, 5, or only 1 photo. There's also embedded text, links, etc.

As for WDDX and XML, my fear is that I'll have problems with reading the file as many of the sites are of the free "GeoCities" nature.

HafaBee's iframe suggestion may turn out to be the best solution. Since I have a growing number of images and text, I could at some point basically take over the bulk of the remote pages real estate. I think the site owner may get a bit upset 🙂

With the scroll bars, I can still present my content, but stay within a certain space restriction.

Thanks Folks. Your help is most appreciated.

Tim

el22

You can -and probably the best way is to- use Javascript, making your users include a .js file in their code that will print the remote html automatically, but given i'm not an expert at JS i don't know how to do it 😉

tsweezey

Thanks el22, that was a big help as well. I actually did figure out how to generate the js file for the feed.

What I'm doing now is having my dynamic php doc writing to a static html file as well as a mirror image js file. The users can select either the iframe or js feed options. The js works very well.

FWIW, to generate the js file, you just read the html file, use "addslashes()" and "trim()" for each line. From there each line in the file needs a prefix of "document.write( " and suffix of "\n" );"

The user puts the following on their page...

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.mysite.com/pub/feed.js"></script>

I'm happy now 🙂

Thanks all!

Tim

el22

Glad that helped 🙂

Sorry for being too lazy to do the js for you 😉 .