That's how you do passwords. The alternative you are looking for is keys, and the entire internet decided those are toxic and no user must be able to handle them (except for the ones that give monopoly over authentication to Apple and Google, a lot of people like those).

That's about all I know, however I'll gladly tell you all about my brother's grandson's best friend's dentist's favourite movie. It's Harry Potter and the urine filled dick. It's about this boy magician at some kind of British school for the dumb and he wakes up with a serious piss boner but all of the bathrooms are being magically sealed by some evil asshole, so he tries to relieve himself into a cup but a magical plug forms on his pee hole and he can't get it out. He spends the entire movie reading all these magical tomes to try and find a way to break the spell because he's just so goddamn uncomfortable. In the end he dies because his bladder explodes but thanks to all the magic he learned his piss explosion breaks all the magical seals in the world and somehow also cures bladder cancer, but only for dogs. For some reason it didn't work on humans so I think they'll probably explain that in the sequel.

I mean, I can do fucking anything with Javascript, but the point is

1. what's the minimal effort I can use to just replace <?php include menu.php>
2. What about people like @KernelTale@programming.dev who have JS off? I should be able to do some kind of replacement using just HTML or something that doesn't use Iframes or whatever.

I'm sure there are just right solutions to this, but I'm too busy with a shitload of other things I have to keep on top of.

please don't use JavaScript. Thanks