I have been looking at some of the issues involved surrounding transclusion lately and I thought I would bounce some of the issues off of the list to see what you other Xanies think. If text is transcluded from another point, there seems to me to be a number of problems surrounding the markup from the original text. For instance: 1) Should the markup from the original source be maintained and exibit its attributes in the text that transcludes it? For example, if the text is in normal face font and the text transcludes another text that happens to be bold, should the bold be maintained? 2) Should the author which creates a text which transcludes another text be capable of modifying the attributes of the transcluded text? (I.e., should the author of the primary text be able to add bold, italic, etc. to the transcluded text?) One argument would be that if a author can add attributes to the transcluded text, the author is simply modifying its format to fit the current textual presentation. OTOH, this could intefere with the "art" of writing the transcluded text. (Some people might get a bit sensitive of people bolding, italicizing, changing the fonts, whatever, of the transcluded text. [Jay Osako] This is a difficult one in regards to HTML. If I'm correct, in Xanadu the issue is one of front ends - since markup is handled as links, rather than inline, it the decision of the documenter (or at least the programmer writing the viewer) whether to keep the font and sizing properties, by keeping or eliminating the links. With in-band markup, its harder to allow that flexibility; you'd have to either set a fixed policy, leavingone side or another dissatisfied, or else have a complex system of explicit enable/disable markups. Moreover (apropos your question below) if your including the markup, you have to process the whole document at least once to get the correct markup (the server will probably cache both the transclusion and the markup for it, but that just move the issue to a different level and to some extent defeats the purpose). It probably would be best to have no carryover as a default, as in Xanadu; the content, after all, should be the message, MacLuhan notwithstanding. What's *really* complex is the handling things like Java applets and other forms of active pages; I can't really think of a suitable solution in the general case for HTML. 3) What granularity should the transcluded text maintain? What I mean by this is that there is a strong movement towards marking up the structure of a document and then assigning the fonts and other textual attributes based on the structure based on this -- SGML like (For example, all headers are Palentino, 25 pt, Bold.) Should the transcluded text have to maintain an entire document structure? For example, if you want to included part of a header, should you be able to included only part of it (say, 3-4 words) or should you have to include all of it since you are including the "header" and to prevent the meaning from being manipulated in the presentation? On one side, you could argue that by forcing a author to include an entire document structure (header, paragraph, footnote, etc.) it avoids words being taken out of context and if someone includes something they are including a "whole" something. On the other side, it could become quite combersome to have to do so. [Jay Osako] My view is that, if possible, only the transcluded material should be picked up, but that it should have a backlink to the source. Most browsers would probably pre-cache the source (esp if it had to process it for markup anyway), and the link should spawn a seperate browser window to allow comparisons, but those are front-end issues and different browsers will probably handle them differently. There are a number of other issues along these lines. I would be interested to hear if anyone else has thought about these issues. (And what they thought. :) Jay Osako
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