how to do an html include on Windows?

Hello, I'm trying to mimic the setup that is out on my webspace locally on my laptop so that I can develop and test without having to publish a test tree to the web space. Part of the code on the web is in PHP. I have written a servlet for Enhydra that allows me to serve my PHP pages just like on the web except that it won't include remote html. That is, if I have a piece of code like: <? file = "http://server-name/dir-name/my-file.jsp include (file); ?> Then I just get a message saying that it can't include the file. Now, after some research I see that the http: type include does not work on the Windows port of PHP (why is that anyway??). So, this brings me to my question. For a PHP non-expert like myself how can I code the same function in a way that will work with both relative (local) and remote (http) address? Ideally I'd like the request, even if relative, to go back to the web-server as includes like JSP's require processing before the resultant stream is included. Kind regards, Mike