Comment On Transclusion

It had transclusion where Wiki only has CutAndPaste ... -- DaveHarris (almost transcluded from WikiIsNotXanadu)

Dave raises a key difference between Wiki and Xanadu, transclusion.

On Wiki, some pages go wildly out of control with interspersed and extended comments. Within reason, small pages like this one can spawn off a subdiscussion without forcing one to get lost. The trick is to add the backlink (or count on the browser's Back feature).

When going back through the back link, it would be really nifty if it could work like a HTTP bookmark, i.e. taking you to the part of the page you really came from.

Could Wiki somehow

auto-copy or better yet link back to the selected quote;
provide an optional(?) back-link to return to the thread one left?

And should it? -- RonJeffries

That's just what CvWiki does. Nothin' to it. -- PeterMerel.

Does it? I had envisioned something more hyper-texty, more groovy and powerful. Something that would let me quote some exotic page (Wiki, HTML, who cares?) here without transcluding the whole thing... it would also be nice if the quoted text (like some paragraph in a news article somewhere) could somehow majically "know" that it had been quoted. Maybe this is MoreSophisticatedReferencing that ought to be discussed elsewhere...

-- AustinDavid

HTML already supports references to a part of another document. If I could say...

   <A NAME="ThisSpot?">Content everyone wants to reference.</A>

Then on another page, I'd say...

   CommentOnTransclusion#ThisSpot?

which could translate to...

   <A HREF=" http://c2.com/cgi/wiki? CommentOnTransclusion#ThisSpot?">CommentOnTransclusion</A>

Maybe Wiki would work better with a more explicit content formatting language, like an XML-based subset of HTML, instead of such ad-hoc constructs such as repeated apostrophes? -- JeffGrigg

I like it as it is. I refer to WikiWikiWeb and WabiSabi: "Wiki wiki means quick in Hawai'ian ... In addition to being quick, this site also aspires to zen ideals generally labeled WabiSabi. Zen finds beauty in the imperfect and ephemeral. " I find wiki wiki wiki and wabi sabi. -- AlistairCockburn

I think Austin's comment is essentially correct; CvWiki/AtisWiki transclusion is whole pages; even if you use the html #placeholder syntax that's not the same as dropping in a fixed-meaning sample. XML would certainly help effect this because you could sample any meaningful field of any doc. I don't think that changes the WikiNature or WabiSabi-ness of the thing, just builds on the way inlined gifs and jpegs already work. Other parts of CvWiki/AtisWiki may indeed detract from wiki's exquisite simplicity - to the extent those parts are mine, MeaCulpa. -- PeterMerel

Isn't Transclusion really like using Trackback -- the principles behind Trackback were not just the ability to stay updated when referencing blog posts were created or changed, but also the ability to include/aggregate related posts on your blog. Trackback performs this very targeted 'transclusion' that is being described here. -- ErikKokkonen?