I have several pages on a website that use the same header for each page. I was wondering if there was some way to simply reference a file with the html for the header sort
You could do it in this fashion below.
<head>
<link rel="import" href="myheadertemplate.html">
</head>
where you could have your myheadertemplate.html
<div>
<h1>This is my header</h1>
<div id = "navbar">
<div class = "Tab">Home</div>
<div class = "Tab">Contact</div>
</div>
</div>
You can then use it with JS below
var content = document.querySelector('link[rel="import"]').import;
As far as I know it's not possible. You can load the header as a webpage in a iframe element though. In the past webpages were built with frame elements to load seperate parts of a webpage, this is not recommended and support in current browsers is due to legacy.
In most cases this is done with server side languages like php with as example include("header.php");
.
So, after a long time I actually found a way to do this using AJAX. HTML Imports are a great solution, but the support across browsers is severely lacking as of 04/2017, so I came up with a better solution. Here's my source code:
function HTMLImporter() {}
HTMLImporter.import = function(url) {
var error, http_request, load, script;
script = document.currentScript || document.scripts[document.scripts.length - 1];
load = function(event) {
var attribute, index, index1, new_script, old_script, scripts, wrapper;
wrapper = document.createElement("div");
wrapper.innerHTML = this.responseText;
scripts = wrapper.getElementsByTagName("SCRIPT");
for (index = scripts.length - 1; index > -1; -- index) {
old_script = scripts[index];
new_script = document.createElement("script");
new_script.innerHTML = old_script.innerHTML;
for (index1 = old_script.attributes.length - 1; index1 > -1; -- index1) {
attribute = old_script.attributes[index1];
new_script.setAttribute(attribute.name, attribute.value);
}
old_script.parentNode.replaceChild(new_script, old_script);
}
while(wrapper.firstChild) {
script.parentNode.insertBefore(wrapper.removeChild(wrapper.firstChild), script);
}
script.parentNode.removeChild(script);
this.removeEventListener("error", error);
this.removeEventListener("load", load);
};
error = function(event) {
this.removeEventListener("error", error);
this.removeEventListener("load", load);
alert("there was an error!");
};
http_request = new XMLHttpRequest();
http_request.addEventListener("error", error);
http_request.addEventListener("load", load);
http_request.open("GET", url);
http_request.send();
};
Now when I want to import HTML into another document, all I have to do is add a script tag like this:
<script>HTMLImporter.import("my-template.html");</script>
My function will actually replace the script tag used to call the import with the contents of my-template.html
and it will execute any scripts found in the template. No special format is required for the template, just write the HTML you want to appear in your code.