Hyperlinks are a reliable way of connecting content together. However, they are not a solid foundation for distributed knowledge that can be added to over time. Without the properties of transclusion, it’s not possible to build on top of it.
Without transclusion built in, there’s no way to ensure that 1) the linked content will be there 2) it hasn’t been altered 3) other programs can access it’s content programatically (APIs are default closed).
See also:
Links to this note
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Make Notes More Useful With Better Links
Zettelkasten notes become more useful the better links you make between them. That’s because you want to find connections to things you did not expect, not what you already know (otherwise you would have gone directly there to begin with).
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Public APIs are default closed due to security and abuse concerns. As a result, the most common pattern for building an API is to expose only what is strictly necessary and incrementally add to it over time. This additive process means public APIs today are always a small subset of what they could do.
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Hyperbole is an emacs package that matches text and turns it into links (buttons in
hyperboleparlance). Links can execute arbitrary code so it’s kind of like a universal emacs subsystem for linking things together (i.e. hypertext).