● Transclusion

266 2026-07-24 note

Transclusion is including a document's content inside another by reference, rather than by copy, so the excerpt is from the source. Don't repeat yourself!

Ted Nelson coined the term decades before wiki software made it common; Gwern.net is the best-known modern example, popping up a preview of practically any link on hover.

For this site, at build time every wikilink gets a hidden sibling <span> holding the first forty or so words of its target note, styled with the same adjacent-hover trick as the footnote CSSThe trick behind the footnotes on this site and the hover previews in notes like colour-theory is the same adjacent-hover pattern, just with different content in the hidden span. It's AetherAnne's pattern for footnotes without JavaScript, wired through markdown-it's renderer…. Hover any link in this paragraph, like Colour TheoryGruvbox's rainbow accent set doubles as the symbol taxonomy's colour legend, see values for the entry that started this. One per entry type: red for quotes, yellow for bookmarks, green for notes, blue for diary entries, purple for snippets, and… or Symbol TaxonomyI'm using single-character symbols, one per type as a quick visual cue: | type | symbol | example | | -------- | ------ | ------------------------ | | quote | > | on-writing-daily | | bookmark | ⚹ | eleventy-interlinker |…, and the preview should appear without a single line of client-side JavaScript.

CSS-only means no images, no multi-paragraph excerpts, and the excerpt text is a naive strip of markdown syntax rather than a proper render, so things like tables show up a little mangled. Good enough.