XInclude enhancements?

XInclude is useful for transclusion, but it's not sufficient to handle
some classes of problems that commonly arise. In particular, copying
content can introduce duplicate ID values.

I wonder if there'd be any interest in extending XInclude to address
some of these problems. The DocBook Technical Committee has spent some
time gathering requirements[1] and devising possible solutions[2] to
address transclusion.

But it seems a shame to invent DocBook-specific markup to handle
problems that are clearly true of most XML vocabularies.

Supporting some kind of special ID/IDREF processing[3] would go a long
way towards making XInclude more useful. (Given a more powerful
XInclude, I think some of the other requirements raised in the DocBook
discussions could be addressed with a new XPointer scheme.)

Worth considering?

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

[1] http://docbook.org/docs/transclusion-requirements/
[2] http://docbook.org/docs/transclusion/
[3] http://docbook.org/docs/transclusion/#d6e180

-- 
Norman Walsh
Lead Engineer
MarkLogic Corporation
Phone: +1 413 624 6676
www.marklogic.com