HTML Overlays

XUL overlays is a great feature of the excellent Mozilla application platform, and now Laurent Jouanneau and Daniel Glazman have created a version for HTML using Javascript to do the legwork.

The idea is to remove navigational elements and other pieces of HTML document that are repeated across multiple pages, and place them in separately downloaded files that can be cached and combined with the rest of the pages content by the browser. A link tag is used to specify which overlays to use, and a Javascript script is used to get the overlays and patch them into the document. The idea is good and the implementation is solid, being based upon the proven technology of XUL overlays.

Backwards compatibility

I have a problem with the backwards compatibilty of the implementation. Without Javascript, the browser doesn’t load the overlays and you lose your navigational elements, not only bad for those with JS turned off but also for Google.

How about instead of using XML we use HTML, the id’s in the overlay file matching up with the id’s in our host document, and the rest of the HTML being disgarded by the Javascript. That way we can use another mechanism to include our overlays if Javascript isn’t present (iframes, object tags, a simple hyperlink) and they are human readable in everyones browsers.

This may remove some of the flexibility, and it doesn’t answer all of the questions, but personally I think this would be a saner way to introduce HTML overlays.

The problem is that we still have to parse out our HTML. The useful thing about using XML is that XMLHttpRequest will parse it and return you a nice DOM tree. We could send our HTML overlay as XML to XMLHttpRequests and as HTML for regular requests, but this makes things messy and adds some unwanted complexity. Mozilla and the latest version of Opera provide us with a DOMParser object we can use to turn our HTML string into a DOM tree, but that doesn’t help IE users.

A better solution

The best solution I can think of is to add a new <overlay> element to our HTML overlays to make them easy to extract with a regular expression. Browsers displaying the HTML would ignore it and our Javascript to grab the overlays from the HTML would be quick and simple.

<overlay id="myOverlay">
    <p>This is content in an overlay.</p>
</overlay>

I’ve put up a demo of my version of HTML overlays in action.