Introduction

On of my projects here on this web is to introduce you to the concept of document containers - or the ability of a single XML document to link to several different files that are delivered "on the fly" into what appears to be a single document.   A good example of this is found on the W3C web site - the annotated XML specification is constructed in this fashion.

What this concept allows us to do is reuse snippets of documents in a more appropriate fashion.  A company logo, for instance, is usually linked into several different documents.  A typical word processing scenario would then involve embedding that logo into a single document, and that document is then stored somewhere where everyone has access to it.

But what happens when the company is merged with another company and the logo changes? Typically, a technical writer goes into his document archive and does a global search and replace on all of the documents to find the old logo, then replaces it with the new logo.   A time consuming and tedious task.

The same concept applies to other document snippets - things like copyright statements, corporate addresses, title pages, "things" (for lack of a better term) that would be considered "boilerplate" information.

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Last modified: May 14, 1999