You clearly don't understand hypermedia. HTML will not have grown up until
it *does* have an <INCLUDE> tag.
Network traffic? Longer display times? Worrying about that is hardly a
forward-thinking thing to do. The potential of hyper-documents is what is
important here.
Why hyper-documents? Not because they're neat. Not because they're The
Next Big Thing.
It's because they work *more like how the human brain works*. The brain
does not like to be told what to think next; each human mind works in
a different way, and ought to be able to follow its own train of thought.
This is why we need <INCLUDE> tags. It's time we thought about the future,
as in 5-10 years from now -- not next week. The internet's bandwidth will
grow, and the speed of computers will increase. We needn't worry about
network traffic or display times.
We need to concern ourselves with the future and the maturation of HTML.
Steve
PS: This "since 2 requests have to be made" thing bugs me, because it's
obvious there's a lack of understanding about HTML/HTTP here. Each page
generates multiple requests to begin with, if it has images. Each image
is a request. That image doesn't have to be at the same site as the page.
So many requests are *already* being made; an <INCLUDE> tag wouldn't
particularly add any.