Towards XML Transclusions

1st Workshop on New Forms of Xanalogical Storage and Function

Angelo Di Iorio ; Silvio Peroni ; Fabio Vitali ; John Lumley ; Tony Wiley

Others  :  http://CEUR-WS.org/Vol-508/paper5.pdf
PID  :  2104

来源: CEUR

【 摘 要 】

The idea of transclusion has been at the same time the strength and weakness of Xanadu: some people considered it as an extremely powerful mechanism to get any version of any fragment of any document in a global shared document space, others as a very complex solution too difficult to be actually implemented and delivered. We believe transclusions are still worth implementing and would allow designers to build very sophisticated hypermedia applications. On the other hand, we are aware that the original design of Xanadu cannot be implemented without uprooting current systems, protocols and technologies - in primis the World Wide Web and XML. In fact, there is a great distance between the original data model of transclusions - strongly based on external referencing mechanisms - and the XML data model - strongly based on hierarchical structures and embedded markup. This paper investigates to what extent the concept of transclusion can be shaped for the world of XML, and studies simplified models for building functionalities inspired by Xanadu. Particular attention is given to the support for tracing fragments provenance in multi-source documents and for synchronizing distributed content through transclusions. The paper also traces a roadmap to actually implement transclusions for XML - identifying three incremental steps - and briefly describes some experimental prototypes.