Agreed that this should be done. The XInclude spec suggests that the processing is transitive. Also, lxml does it that way, in both the libxml2 based implementation and the ElementInclude compatibility module.

https://github.com/lxml/lxml/blob/master/src/lxml/ElementInclude.py

(note that this was adapted for lxml, so it's not a drop-in replacement for ET anymore)

Changing target version to Py3.5 as this is essentially a new (and somewhat backwards incompatible) feature.