Uh oh. Sounds like this is basically b l o c k c h a i n.

What if it's like this:

Someone: "I have an article with lots of cool links to websites that I'd like to include. I would like to publish it now."

Computer: "Okay, let me grab those links and add them to a public log so if the websites' original authors are curious, they can see you've linked to their site."

Someone: "Sure."

Computer: "Adding to log:"

source: https://hyperfov.com/blog/an-article {
    {
        ref: https://why.pith.is,
        text: "the Pith project",
        context: "One example of a branching discussion space is the Pith project."
    },
    {
        ref: https://futureland.tv,
        ...
     }
}

That's it. There's a log, and anyone interested can query that log to produce forward links, backlinks, live transclusions, etc. Anyone who opts in can publish the links they've used to that log with information such as the link's hypertext, the text of the containing element, and so on. When any of that information is changed, the entry is changed on the log. Any websites watching would immediately get the most up to date content, essentially a transclusion.

Of course, verifying the information is actually correct would be something that would also have to be considered.

Why would anyone use something like this? You would need to install some extra javascript on your website, perhaps provide some sort of custom endpoint on your server that other servers could access… Either that or it's somehow centralized, which is less than ideal.

It seems like there's a gradient of potential difficulty in joining the network that you'd have to contend with. It could be very easy and purely centralized, or difficult and purely decentralized.

The problem is that a protocol is hard to design, get accepted (main issue), implement, then get adopted in practice. A top down approach seems like a bad idea; perhaps a better place to start is to build a network that has some of the key properties the protocol should have. A kind of prototype.

One challenge is that projects like quoteback don't have a way to transmit information between pages that use the script. There's no network of pages. This means that features like backlinks simply aren't possible because each site is completely independent from the others.

This is why true transclusion remains a radical idea because there's no standard protocol to support the deep linking that creating a bi-directional connection between two pieces of content would require.

The quoteback project is a step in the right direction. It's a component you can use to display quotes from other websites in a standard format.

From what I can tell, the text isn't actually transcluded though. It's basically a fancy wrapper for a blockquote element that adds an a tag to it. You copy the text over to your page and your copy remains separate from the original.

There's also no way to see a page's backlinks.

There's probably a million ways to address this in tons of different contexts. The first goal here is to just make the experience different.

The point is that <a href="{. . .}">{. . .}</a> is used so many different ways. That's not a bad thing, but there are times when it might be good to augment the experience of browsing (clicking on <a> tags and navigating from website to website) with some additional context.

A hyperlink often is a black hole. It should be more like a glass door you can look through and open if you'd like.