Transclusion is a great concept which I first time saw and used in Jacobson's Objectory software engineering tool. It's also available in the CrossLine information manager (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine).
Transclusion is an appealing and beautiful seeming idea but it's an extremely difficult thing to implement. Even more, it's not at all evident in the end if it's desirable. Transclusion involves effectively conditionally including text or other fragments within documents.
It's easy for schemes of this sort to become fragile constructs. Moreover, the primary motivation for such an approach is copyright management - IE, fighting the "information wants to be free" tendency.
> it's not at all evident in the end if it's desirable
In the Objectory tool you could e.g. use it to re-use definitions along a specification. You could add a translucent link and show the text wherever needed without creating redundancy.
Transclusions are great indeed! With proper filer mechanisms it's amazing what you can do. Have a look a TiddlyWiki (https://tiddlywiki.com/), which is open source and essentially built on transclusions. It's a bit hard to explain, but when one gets one's head around the concept, it's extremely powerful and flexible!
Just too bad it's also no open standard and for now in the cloud.
I tried in for a little product review I did of a friends app. Once I was done I found out there is no good way to export any of it to anything readable...
My choices where broken markdown or css-hacks for clean screenshots.
Markdown would be ok if it would translate well, it's made to be rendered as HTML after all.
A new line in markdown however is not the same as a new line in roam, but in the export it is treated like it is. If you render the exported markdown as html you will have a lot of paragraphs broken (and maybe lists too, don't quite remember).
