the thing with the approach of “treat everything as an include, create a conceptual archive containing the entire site, and then extract that into public” is that (1) being able to just xpath into any file at any time is actually extremely powerful, and (2) this does just mean loading your entire site into memory and doing every transformation on it all in one go
the approach is to define a
<x:wrapper>
<书社:link xlink:href="about:shushe?include=things/" xlink:show="embed"/>
</x:wrapper>
which then gets all the files in $(INCLUDEDIR)/things/ and transforms to a
<书社:archive 书社:expanded="">
<html:article 书社:archived-as="index.html"><!--…--></html:article>
<!--…-->
</书社:archive>
not hard to do at all