Chapter 12. XInclude
XInclude is a new technology developed at the W3C for combining multiple well-formed and optionally valid documents and fragments thereof into a single document. It’s similar in effect to using external entity references to assemble a document from several component pieces. However, XInclude can assemble a document from resources that are themselves fully well-formed documents that include XML declarations and even document type declarations. It can also use XPointers to extract only a piece of an external document, rather than including the entire thing.
XInclude defines two elements, xi:include
and xi:fallback
, both
in the http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude
namespace. An
xi:include
element has an href
attribute that points to a document. An
XInclude processor replaces all the xi:include
elements in a master document with
the documents they point to. These documents can be other XML documents
or plain text documents like Java source code. If the xi:include
element has an xpointer
attribute, then the xi:include
element is replaced by only those
parts of the remote document that the XPointer indicates. If the
processor cannot find the external document the href
attribute points to, then it replaces the
xi:include
element with the contents
of the element’s xi:fallback
child
element instead.
Warning
This chapter is based on the April 13, 2004 2nd Candidate Recommendation of XInclude. We think this draft is pretty stable, but it’s possible some of the details described ...
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