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                          The Transclusion of images

One of the fundamental tennents of Ted Nelson's [1] Xanadu [2] is
transclusion [3]; the World Wide Web as we know it has a very limited version
of that and it's mostly limited to images. It's pretty easy to do in HTML
(HyperText Markup Language):

> <IMG SRC="http://grumpy.conman.org/2003/06/01/new-laptop.jpg" WIDTH="190"
> HEIGHT="241" ALT="[Picture of Mark's new laptop]" TITLE="Picture of Mark's
> new laptop">
>

And voila!

[Picture of Mark's new laptop] [4]

Instant transclusion of an image.

And there have been plenty of times I would have liked the ability to
transclude portions of HTML as well (technically, you can do whole HTML pages
Spring [5] is doing that for her Live Journal friends [6] page on her own
journal [7]—doing portions is a bit harder) since that would make it easier
to quote the page I might link to (as I did on Baby names gone bad [8]).

But there are two problems with transclusion. The first problem is the dead
page problem. Web pages go dead with alarming regularity (in fact, check out
my first post [9] and follow the link [10]—it's no longer there) and thus the
page you might have once transcluded is no longer the page you think is being
transcluded. Ted Nelson avoided this problem by stipulating that once a page
was created, it exists until the end of time. Highly optimistic outlook on
his part (and there are instances where people might not want a page to exist
until the end of time (really bad attitude) [11]).

The second problem is one I'm now struggling with: do I want my stuff
transcluded? Especially if I'm footing the bandwidth bill?

Over the past few months I've noticed that several of the pictures I've put
up here in the Boston Diaries are being referenced from other pages, just
like I've included Mark's [12] picture on this entry. And I'm not sure how I
feel about that. On the one hand, the amount of bandwidth incurred isn't that
much, considering how much bandwidth overall this server is pumping out each
month. But on the other hand, it still is my bandwidth and the images are
being displayed in a context I might not want.

Oh yes, I've tried looking at the pages that include my images. And while
some of the pages I can see how the image is used in the new context (and
universally the pages including my images are web based message boards),
about half the pages are locked from my view since I'm not a member of that
particular message board.

A few months ago I wrote one the webmaster of one of the message boards about
my image being used (I was just curious to see the page it was on) and it was
taken care of (the webmaster removed the link to my image). But this is going
on more and more, and I'm not quite sure how to address this; or even if it's
a real problem I should be worried about.

I was talking to Mark [13] about this tonight and he was of the opinion that
this was wrong and that it would be an easy fix to check the referring link
and refuse to serve up the picture, or serve up an alternative picture:

[F33R MY M@D L33T GR@FX 5K1LL5!!!!] [14]

Although there are cases when I might want to include the image on another
webpage elsewhere, so I have to have some way of indicating if an images can
be transcluded or not, or have a way of specifying which pages are allowed to
include this image (or anything else that can currently be transcluded). Ted
Nelson's overly optimistic solution to this problem (well, the bandwidth
problem, not necessarily the permissions problem) was one of royalty
payments, aka (Also Known As) micropayments. But even if we had a workable
micropayment system, other problems, like the “pay-as-you-play” problem
(everything else being equal, people like flat rates).

Update on Wednesday, July 31^st, 2024

Two things about the above missing image:

 1. the site I hot-linked it from no longer exists
 2. I no longer use hot linked images on the blog

I also don't have a copy of the image, so pretend there's an image of a
laptop where it says “[Picture of Mark's new laptop]” (or you just see the
icon for a broken image).


[1] http://ted.hyperland.com/
[2] http://xanadu.com/
[3] http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?TransClusion
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2003/06/05/new-laptop.jpg
[5] http://www.springdew.com/
[6] http://www.livejournal.com/users/springdew/friends/
[7] http://www.springdew.com/mimosa/mimosa.htm
[8] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2003/05/28.1
[9] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:1999/12/04.1
[10] http://www.teleport.com/~ennead/ampersand/sim/procon.html
[11] http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html
[12] http://www.conman.org/people/myg/
[13] http://www.conman.org/people/myg/
[14] gopher://gopher.conman.org/gPhlog:2003/06/05/madskills.png

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