Alternatives to XInclude
It can be quite difficult to distinguish between the concepts of including, linking, and generally associating resources. Both the XML standard itself, and other adjunct standards, offer similar features to XInclude.
It could be observed that the XLink 'embed' feature (see Chapter 27) performs a similar role to XInclude. Indeed, this XLink feature has the additional strength that it also supports binary formats. However, XInclude is a lot simpler than XLink and actually creates a new merged document, while XLink only creates a temporary merged view (usually in a browser window).
A more realistic overlap in functionality is seen when comparing this feature with external XML entity referencing (see Chapter 4), and it could ...
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