[uf-discuss] include pattern

Tue Jun 6 17:11:05 PDT 2006

If you're not familiar with the include pattern, is a method for 
doing transclusion within a webpage. It was invented to deal with 
several use-cases where existing microformats specifications would 
required that a piece of data be repeated multiple times on a page, 
despite this being human/author unfriendly. Read the wiki page 
[http://microformats.org/wiki/include-pattern] for more info.
Anyway, there's been some discussion on the microformats-dev list, 
which raised an issue with this pattern. The issue is this: does the 
inclusion include only the children of the referenced element, or the 
referenced element itself?
If we take referenced elements and their children, you can do 
something like this:
<span class="fn" id="a">Ryan King</span>
<span class="vcard><object class="include" data="#a" type="text/ 
html" /></span>
If we only take children, then the above would have to become.
<span id="a"><span class="fn">Ryan King</span></span>
<span class="vcard><object class="include" data="#a" type="text/ 
html" /></span>
Of course, the issue is a bit more complex than this, as it can 
create a bit more complexity for parsers to deal with.
DanC's summarized the discussion over on mf-dev in this email [http:// 
microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-dev/2006-May/000097.html].
I think I know where the people in the mf-dev conversation think 
about this (Dan, Tantek, Brian and myself) , but I'd like to open 
this discussion up to more people, as it was the potential to impact 
publishers.
thanks,
ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com