Or, is javascript the easiest way to do this...?

If your server supports them, and it probably does, you can use Server-Side Includes, after renaming your .html page to .shtml.

If iframes are out, then JavaScript is the way forward. 'Ajax' is the buzzword for this technique. Finding a lightweight JavaScript library which handles the ins and outs of xmlHttpRequest for you will probably help; mootools and mochikit are both good.

This is the single most annoying exclusion from the html standard.

The simplest (though non standards compliant and completely hacky) way to do this is to put <script src="whatever.js"></script> into your main document. Your whatever.js needs to look like this:

document.write('<b>text to import</b>');

If you have lots to import you can either stuff it all into one command or use multiple document.write commands;

Is their anyway to use the javascript script to open a php file?

Right now, I'm working between 2 sites. On one, I can run php, and am using it to create pages from a MySQL database.


I'd like to be able to load content created by the php onto the site that can't run php, ideally into a page that already exists.

You don't need to do anything special, just have the script tag link to you PHP, and insert the document.write commands into the text outputted by the PHP script. Use PHP's addslashes() function around your text to make sure quote marks in your text don't mess up the javascript syntax.

eg:
echo "<b>drezdn's text&lt/b>";

becomes:
echo "document.write('".addslashes("<b>drezdn's text&lt/b>")."');\n";

which when loaded should output:
document.write('<b>drezdn\'s text&lt/b>');