Can I use JavaScript to insert in place some plaintext from a remote file by URL?

Question

So, I'm not sure if the reason I'm having trouble with this is because it looks awfully like malicious activity or not. What I'm attempting to do is make my life a little less terrible with a piece of very inflexible and outdated web-based software.

Basically, there's a block of HTML that I can edit from within the software (it's inserted into a td element), and I want to have the content of that block come from a plaintext file on my local drive, being synced to the cloud with Dropbox.

It is possible to do something like this:

<td>
  <script>
    insert_text_from_url("https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/blahblahblah/file.txt?token_hash=blahblahblah&dl=1");
  </script>
</td>

With the output being <td>[contentsof_file.txt]</td>?

Answer 1

Rather than load a remote plaintext file, it turned out to be much easier to make the remote file a JavaScript "wrapper" that had the plaintext inlined using a rather-hackish "multiline text variable":

remote_editable_file.js:

var myString = function(){/*

Editable plaintext or whatever goes here!
Multiline, too!

*/}.toString().slice(15,-4);
document.getElementById('content').innerHTML = myString;

The last line is what does all the work; it's simple enough that jQuery is overkill unless you run into insurmountable portability issues.

In the originating page (the block of HTML that is only editable manually), all you then need is:

<div id="content"></div>
<script src="https://dropbox/link/to/remote_editable_file.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Answer 2

You can accomplish this with JQuery. You'll want to have a way you can lookup your td, like giving it an id:

<td id="insertTextHere">
</td>
<script>
    $(function(){
          $('#insertTextHere').load('https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/blahblahblah/file.txt?token_hash=blahblahblah&dl=1');
    });
</script>