Re: Transclusion Issues

[Andrew Pam <xanni@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Art Pollard wrote:
> 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?

I would suggest that the author's original markup should be preserved
unless explicitly overridden.

> 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.

They might, but if they have published the material under transcopyright then
by definition they have explicitly granted permission in advance for online
reuse (by reference) in any context.  The Xanadu idea is to provide a user
interface which always permits you to follow the transclusion back to the
original context of the transcluded document.

> 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. 

The transcluding author can choose to select any portion they wish, from a
fragment to the entire document.  For the context issue, see my answer above.

Share and enjoy,
		*** Xanni ***
-- 
mailto:xanni@xxxxxxxxxx                         Andrew Pam
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