XInclude

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XInclude is a generic mechanism for merging XML documents, by writing inclusion tags in the "main" document to automatically include other documents or parts thereof^[1]. The resulting document becomes a single composite XML Information Set. For example, including the text file license.txt:

This document is published under GNU Free Documentation License

in a XHTML:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
...
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">
   <head>...</head>
   <body>
      ...
      <p><xi:include href="license.txt" parse="text"/></p>
   </body>
</html>

gives:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
...
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">
   <head>...</head>
   <body>
      ...
      <p>This document is published under GNU Free Documentation License</p>
   </body>
</html>

The mechanism is similar to HTML's <object> tag (which is specific to the HTML markup language), but the XInclude mechanism works with any XML format, such as SVG and XHTML.