Transclusion, Ted Nelson, and Xanadu

A correspondent asked about my use of the term transclusion. I said I thought it came from Ted Nelson and Xanadu, and that I was using it correctly, but that I'd check and make sure.

Here's Google's #1 page on transclusion. I think I got it right. We transclude images on the web, but not typically documents. And it's not surprising that we don't, or haven't until now. Documents that didn't have the ability to be transcluded in a collapsed state, and then gradually revealed, would be overwhelming.

It's really interesting to see Sjoerd Visscher, Joshua Allen, and presumably others I don't yet know about, pushing the envelope on ways to manage accordian structures in the browser. It's going to be important, I think.

Trivia note: Dave and I were present at the Open Source convention, in 1999, at which Ted Nelson released the source code to Xanadu. This was the first time Dave and I met, I think. We sat side by side in the terminal garden, blogging the event -- me to my BYTE.com newsgroup, Dave to Scripting.com. We had so much fun Dave missed his panel. Here's the article I filed on the convention.


Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/03/30.html#a157