XML Companion, The, Third Edition

Overview

It is the very nature of XML document structures that encourages information re-use, and the building of documents from many components. Indeed, the XML standard includes support for this concept, employing internal and external general entities to achieve this effect. But XInclude takes a fresh approach, addressing some of the perceived weaknesses in the entities feature built in to the XML standard.

The XInclude standard defines a single 'inclusion' element that can be used to reference another document, or just a fragment of another document, or even a fragment of the current document, with the intention that the referenced content should replace this inclusion instruction:

In general, this standard is one of several attempts to ...