I think it's a lexical question.
A HTML page is supposed to be a structured document. Including complete structure within an element is currently provided by the IFRAME and OBJECT elements, but it's clearly not what you want. This is because conventional "include" files are pre-processing - they help make the file be a complete, structured document. Put another way, they need to be processed before the structure can be evaluated.
So, lexically, you need another "language" that is the put-the-file-together context. The C pre-processor is a good example of this, but HTML doesn't have anything. Apache's scripted HTML puts its meta comands inside SGML comments; that might be the right context. Anyone know if SGML has the appropriate instruction?
Wade.
"All around me are nothing but fakes
Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"