XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

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 2^nd Candidate Recommendation of XInclude. We think this draft is pretty stable, but it’s possible some of the details described ...