I had an epiphany when, at the 2008 FileMaker Developer Conference, I saw Todd Geist's technique for recreating the status area using the Web Viewer. What the Web Viewer allows you to do, over traditional calculation field approaches, is remove the feature from the context of the current table. In other words, traditional calculation techniques require you to create calculation fields in each table to represent the found count or current sort order. For example, you might create the following formula in a calculation field:
Get(FoundCount)
If you set the storage options for the calculation to unstored, the result of the calculation will update as the found set changes. The only problem is, you have to create the same calculation field in every table where you want to recreate the status area. If you use the same techniques in a Web Viewer, you only have to create the formula once and copy and paste the Web Viewer from layout to layout and file to file, thus, abstracting the calculations from the table schema.
For starters, you first have to know how to reference HTML code without referencing an external file. It's actually quite simple, requiring a short piece of code at the beginning of your HTML:
data:text/html,