XInclude

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. The resulting document becomes a single composite XML Information Set. The XInclude mechanism can be used to incorporate content from either XML files or non-XML text files.

Example

For example, including the text file license.txt:

in an XHTML document:

gives:

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.