[uf-discuss] include pattern

[Ryan King]

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