Whilst waiting for the go ahead from a potential client, I have been pondering over the last few days about the advantages and disadvantages of transclusion.
Transclusion appears to be a powerful tool to bring together disparate chunks of information without necessitating content duplication. The TW I am planning for will utilise this a lot.
However, I am concerned when it comes to maintaining a chunk of content. How do I know that making a change will not negate one or more transclusions of this chunk. The change may remove the attributes for the transclusion in one or more chunks. I am not aware of a TW facility to check where the chunk is transcluded so an evaluation of the proposed maintenance can be done prior to stuffing things up.
If you follow Robert E Horn’s Information Mapping ideas (espoused in his book, Mapping hypertext : the analysis, organization, and display of knowledge for the next generation of on-line text and graphics : Horn, Robert E : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive), you can see how this can organise large amounts of content through manageable chunks (information objects in his terms). But the problem remains unaddressed in his ideas.
How have other TW developers addressed this issue in their non-trivially sized TW’s?
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