This line tells the Web server to execute the Windows command line utility, GETHTTP, with the Web URL to be retrieved to be passed to it as a parameter. Any output by the command line utility -- in this case the contents of the specified Web page -- are diverted into the SHTML page as served to the user, and the code between <!-- and --> removed in the process.

This method will work on pages hosted on most servers, such as Microsoft IIS or Apache, and also on the native HTTP server built into Domino (which serves HTML files stored in the /data/domino/html directory). However, SSI is not supported for Notes pages served on the Web.

IFRAME/ILAYER example
IFRAMEs and ILAYERs are very flexible and useful Web tags, with one major annoyance -- Microsoft has supported IFRAME since Internet Explorer 3, but Netscape doesn't recognize it, and vice versa for the Netscape alternative ILAYER. Either of them allows you to dynamically include HTML code from another page, Web agent or even another Web server, without using a frameset, SSI or JavaScript. The page with the IFRAME/ILAYER commands can be a Notes page served by Domino, or a HTML file served by Apache, MS IIS, etc. A non-Domino page can use this to include code generated by a Web agent on a remote Domino server.

This example below shows you how HTML code can be included on a Web page from another source, in a way that is compatible with both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator -- one will ignore the IFRAME and the other will ignore the ILAYER. Of course, if you're developing for a corporate intranet, you may have the luxury of coding for just one browser.

Advanced ideas
With documents and media managed within Notes, there are many more possibilities for development, limited only by imagination and your development ability. Some projects, like the workflow suggested above, bring the traditional Notes disciplines of approval and version control to Web media. Others, like the ability to select different media files for different browsers, break new ground in Web development.

For example, it's relatively trivial to implement media usage counters, incremented every time a file is requested. These in turn can be combined with the file size stored in a Notes field to derive a total bandwidth usage by file -- the information you need to make the biggest difference in optimizing files.

One criticism of storing media files inside Notes is the performance hit over storing them on the local file system. This is one of the main trade-offs between performance and manageability. But there's no reason why you can't have the best of both worlds. In a previous article, "Build your own Domino hit counter" (which you can find at http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue199903/webcount001.html), I demonstrated how Notes-created images could be cached on the Web server's local storage for big performance gains.