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Submission of draft-pam-html-fine-trans-00.txt

INTERNET DRAFT                                                Andrew Pam
<draft-pam-html-fine-trans-00.txt>                        Project Xanadu
Expires 2 September 1997                                    2 March 1997

       Fine-Grained Transclusion in the Hypertext Markup Language

Status of this Memo

   This document is an Internet-Draft.  Internet-Drafts are working doc-
   uments of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and
   its working groups.  Note that other groups may also distribute work-
   ing documents as Internet-Drafts.

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   Distribution of this document is unlimited.  Please send comments
   to the author at <xanni@xxxxxxxxxx>.  This document is intended to
   become an informational RFC, and its content is designed for adoption
   in other standards and specifications.


Abstract

   The word "hypertext" was coined by Theodor Holm Nelson in his paper
   "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the
   Indeterminate", presented at the ACM 20th national conference in
   1965.  One of the key concepts in Nelson's vision of hypertext is
   "transclusion" or virtual inclusion, which permits composite
   documents to be constructed by reference to the original components
   rather than by copying.

   The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language used
   to create hypertext documents that are platform independent.
   HTML currently permits the transclusion of various content types
   using tags which accept a "SRC" attribute, such as the <IMG>, <EMBED>
   and <APPLET> tags, but does not provide a mechanism for transcluding
   textual content.  This document proposes markup for text
   transclusions in HTML and explains its usage.

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Internet Draft            Transclusion in HTML              2 March 1997

Introduction

   The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) [RFC1866] is a simple markup
   language used to create hypertext documents that are platform
   independent.  This draft describes markup for an additional feature
   needed to support Nelson's vision of composite documents constructed
   by reference to the original documents.  For more information, see
   http://www.xanadu.net/xanadu/


Syntax

   The proposal is to add an HTML tag with the following syntax:

   <TEXT SRC=(URI) {PLAIN} {RANGE=(start),(end)}> 

   Where parentheses () enclose variable parameters and braces {}
   enclose optional elements.

   The SRC attribute is mandatory, and specifies the source document
   from which text is to be transcluded.  (URI) must be the Universal
   Resource Identifier of a plain text or HTML document.  If the source
   document is HTML and the optional PLAIN attribute is specified,
   all HTML tags are removed and all SGML entities converted to the
   characters they represent.  If PLAIN is omitted, the source document
   is transcluded verbatim.  In either case, only the contents of the
   <BODY> element of the source document is transcluded.  If the source
   document is already plain text, the PLAIN attribute has no effect.

   If the optional RANGE attribute is specified, only part of the
   source document is transcluded.  (start) and (end) are integers
   representing character offsets from the beginning of the source
   document (immediately after the <BODY> tag for HTML) or negative
   character offsets from the end of the source document (immediately
   before the </BODY> tag for HTML).  If (end) is zero, the source
   document is transcluded until the end.


Implementation

   The intention is to have a facility in authoring programs that
   permits the author to create transclusions by indicating an insertion
   point, viewing the document from which they wish to transclude,
   and marking the region to be transcluded, much in the manner of a
   traditional "cut and paste" operation except that what is actually
   pasted is the reference to the transcluded portion rather than the
   literal text.

   Initially, this could be a small editing program purely for adding
   transclusions to existing documents. It has also been suggested that
   people might wish to add transclusions by hand, in which case it
   might be desirable to have other ways of specifying the start and end
   of the range besides just the byte offsets, which are inconvenient
   to determine by hand.

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Internet Draft            Transclusion in HTML              2 March 1997

Possible Extensions

   The following additional formats have been proposed for the (start)
   and (end) values:

   1. HTML target anchors <A NAME="target"> within the source
      document, indicated by a hash character followed by the anchor
      name.  These can optionally be followed by a positive or negative
      character offset from immediately before the tag, for example
      "RANGE=#start+5,#end-1".

   2. Paragraphs within the source document, indicated by the letter P
      and the paragraph number counting from the beginning of the
      document.  These can optionally be followed by a positive or
      negative character offset from the start of the paragraph, for
      example "RANGE=P5+2,P9-3".  A paragraph break is represented
      by one or more blank lines in a plain text document and the <P>
      tag in an HTML document.

   3. Pattern matches within the source document, indicated by slashes
      or single or double quotes delimiting the pattern to match and
      optionally the letter I indicating a case insignificant match.
      Pattern matches were suggested by Paul Haeberli in his "Merge"
      script [MERGE].  These can optionally be followed by a positive or
      negative character offset from the start of the match, for example
      "RANGE=/<ADDRESS>/i+3,'</ADDRESS>'i-5".  Only the first match is
      used, and the transclusion is not performed at all if a match
      can not be found in the source document.


Acknowledgements

   Paul Haeberli <paul@xxxxxxx>
   Theodor Holm Nelson <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>
   Yousuke Igarashi <yousuke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


References

   [MERGE]        http://reality.sgi.com/grafica/merge/

   [RFC1866]      T. Berners-Lee and D. Connolly, "Hypertext Markup Lan-
                  guage - 2.0" (RFC1866), MIT/W3C, November 1995.


Author's Address

   Andrew Pam
   Project Xanadu
   P.O. Box 26 East Melbourne VIC 8002 Australia

   Phone: +61 3 9651 1511
   Fax:   +61 3 9651 1502
   Email: xanni@xxxxxxxxxx

                        Expires 2 September 1997            [Page 3]