Transclusions in an HTML-Based Environment

Abstract

Transclusions are an advanced technique for the inclusion of existing content into new documents without the need to duplicate it. Although originally described in the early 1960s, transclusions have still not been made available to users and authors on the world wide web. This paper describes the prototype implementation of a system that allows users to write articles that may contain transclusions. The system offers a simple web-based interface where users can compose new articles. With a simple button the user has the ability to insert a transclusion from any HTML page available on the world wide web. While other approaches introduce new markups for the HTML specification, make use of technologies such as XML and XLink or employ authoring systems that internally support transclusions and can generate web pages as output, this implementation solely relies on the techniques provided by an HTML-based environment. Therefore HTML, Javascript, the Document Object Model, CGI scripts and HTTP are the core technologies utilised in the prototype.