Remembering the Future

The spirit of modular programming dictates that you break your tasks up into small manageable chunks. This dictum is as also applicable when producing XML documents. It often makes sense to build a large document from several smaller ones. Some situations that call for this chunking include composing a single book out of multiple chapters, building a Web page out of separately maintained documents, or adding a standard footer such as a corporate disclaimer into document. There are many ways to approach solving the problem of how to construct a single XML document from multiple documents. This article focuses on one, which looks destined to be the universal general-purpose mechanism for facilitating modularity in XML: XML Inclusions (XInclude).