From XML inclusions to XML transclusions

Modularized documents, composed of fragments from multiple sources, provide users high maintainability and reuse. In the world of XML, powerful and widely-supported solutions exist to create such documents. Surprisingly enough, a lot of interesting features - especially those envisioned by the pioneers of the hypermedia community - are still missing for XML inclusions. The goal of this paper is to investigate these issues and identify possible improvements in this area. Our main inspiration is the Xanadu project and the concept of transclusions. This paper proposes an enhanced model to describe and interact with XML inclusions. We identify multiple classes of inclusions and multiple views of multi-source documents. Particular attention is also given to the idea of making inclusions transparent to both users and applications. An engine producing composite documents, with rich information about inclusions, and a viewer for modularized XML documents are presented as well.