Transclusion - History and Implementation By Project Xanadu

History and Implementation By Project Xanadu

Ted Nelson (who had also originated the words "hypertext" and "hypermedia") coined the term "transclusion" in his 1982 book, Literary Machines. Part of his proposal was the idea that micropayments could be automatically exacted from the reader for all the text, no matter how many snippets of content are taken from various places.

However, according to Nelson, the concept of transclusion had already formed part of his 1965 description of hypertext; Nelson defines transclusion as "the same content knowably in more than one place", setting it apart from more special cases such as the inclusion of content stored in a different location (which he calls "transdelivery") or "explicit quotation which remains connected to its origins" (which he calls "transquotation").

Some hypertext systems, including Ted Nelson's own Xanadu Project, support transclusion.

Nelson has delivered a demonstration of Web transclusion, the Little Transquoter (programmed to Nelson's specification by Andrew Pam in 2004-2005). It creates a new format built on portion addresses from Web pages; when dereferenced, each portion on the resulting page remains click-connected to its original context—always a key aspect of transclusion for Nelson, but missing in most implementations of transclusion.

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