Villa Magna

Article about 'Transclusion'

Transclusion is a term coined by Ted Nelson in his seminal 1965 paper “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate”. In essence this is the seamless inclusion of chunks of data or text from another hypertext within a hypertext without cutting off the link to the original.

Let us imagine that this article is somebody’s narrative about a particular group of burials. It would be really handy to have an image of the context being described such as a photo of it. We could download that image and embed it into our new document OR we could transclude it:

With an image, the advantages of transclusion over embedding are less obvious, but for example, what about transcluding a plan? In this case, we are transcluding a snapshot of the latest GIS data. If we had chosen to embed, it would give us a static and possibly outdated snapshot of the data at the time it was made.

Context: 2048

Context: 2064

— Andy Dufton· Apr 1, 10:34