Vlad's Roam Garden

Powered by 🌱Roam Garden

Make Transclusion work

Transclusion seems like a valuable primitive and when used well - it makes the web experience considerably richer (see https://gwern.net for example)

And yet, its usages are few and far between. In this post I'm trying to figure out - why, and how we can improve on that?

Why is it useful?

screenshots is a sad least common denominator for sharing content

"sharing the unshareable"

Problems

lack of tooling

coarse grained context addressing

moving between authentication contexts

share a Roam page

More then documents

"Transclude onto a local disk"

Subscribe to updates of a file or a document

For any web-accessible file/page/document/etc. I want to be able to:

include it/parts of it in other documents

get notifications on change

ideally preserving historical versions over time as Internet Archive does

have a set of common transformations I can apply to it (e.g. scraping and presenting a "structured data view")

Experiments:

a browser extension that enables

fragment-link previews

iframeable link previews

sliding panels UI for links that can be previewed

sharing selected fragments of web-pages as a self-contained HTML file

A library that allows you to easily add live previews to your website

Referenced in