Declarative partial updates

Sep 20, 2025

A native way to include site fragments.

Declarative partial updates (calling it DPU for now) is a transclution method using a html native element instead of relying on server-side code. Imagine a <fragment> tag that calls a header.html file like so:

<fragment src="parts/header.html">
...
</fragment>

It’s an HTML native way of doing an include like in PHP. Introducing such a feature opens up multiple questions. Here’s some from the discussion I read at github:

  1. how to style fragments?
  2. how to reference files (css/js), fragments local directory or the calling html file’s directory?

Keeping track of the progess at the WICG repo.