Ted Nelson om "transclusion"

Everyone wants to improve on Web structure, but few see how stuck it is-- the browser limits what can be seen, and the one-way embedded links limit connectivity.



I still want to implement the original hypertext concept from the sixties and seventies. Politics and paradigms, not possibility, have held it back. Transclusion-based hypertext has great promise, fulfilling (I believe) all the things people want that the Web cannot do. But to build a clean system around transclusion, we do not embed, since that brings inappropriate markup and links to new contexts. Most importantly, we must have editability with persistent addresses-- which means non-breaking stable addresses for every element. Each new version is distributed as pointers to stabilized content. We do our canonical editing and distribution via EDL (Edit Decision List, a Hollywood concept); thus content addresses never change, and links need not break. This is highly general, not just for text. It directly gives us a universal format for all media and their combinations, including multitrack texts, movies and audio.