Matters

O'Reilly Network: MP3 Sound Bites: "Although the amount of audio content keeps growing, the time available for listening remains constant. Until and unless we achieve a radical breakthrough in speech-to-text translation--and I'm not holding my breath--we'll need to find another way to make audio content more granular, and easier to consume selectively. In the realm of hypertext we do this by quoting passages--that is, lifting fragments out of texts that we read, and placing them (with attribution) into texts that we write. Hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson wanted things to work differently. He wanted us to include (his word: transclude) passages, not copy them. But Nelson's vision of Xanadu never materialized. XLink and XPointer, the key standards designed to support transclusion, remain obscure. What we've actually got are whole-document URLs plus a few strategies for subdocument addressing. The common one is destination anchors--blog permalinks, for example--that mark locations within documents. Less common, and requiring active server participation, are annotation systems that work with arbitrary byte ranges. "