Today I have received a couple of separate pieces of feedback from folks wondering when - and if - I am going to talk about the solutions to the problem areas I have been outlining vis-a-vis XML in legislatures/parliaments.
Yes, I will be talking about the solutions and I will start doing it soon. Nearly there now laying out the most important problem areas... Your patience is appreciated. It will be must easier for me to explain all the "whys" that the architecture discussion will provoke, once I have laid out the problem areas that need to be tackled.
2 comments:
Thanks Sean - As a long time python user and recent law student, I'm constantly finding the code/law relationship remarkable.
Reading legislation/cases constantly feels like I'm dissecting a program/codebase to find out how it works. Some are much simpler than others.
I feel like I'm back in my early days of learning to code/use computers seriously where I read everything I could get my hands on and gradually started to understand some of it!
It's interesting to see the problems/challenges outlined and I'm finding these much more interesting than particular solutions.
These posts have also gone a long way to answering why only some jurisdictions have made the step to have authoritative sources of legislation online.
Thanks again for a great series of posts!
I've read your law/XML articles with interest since they are quite relevant to my work as an engineering manager at a medical device company. We are regulated by the US FDA and have to follow a strict quality system for all aspects of product development. I led implementation of our system and used an XML format (docbook with extensions) for most design documents. This allowed me to do a lot of metaprocessing (python tools, naturally) for things like tracing use cases to product specs to engneering outputs to tests and including reports on such in the rendered documents.
In the course of review, audit, format changes, nontechnical readers, etc. I have encountered many of the same issues you raise. Very frustrating to match up review notes using terms like "section 3.2" or "page 25" with my XML docs and their unnumbered sect1 tags! We have to fall back on PDF as the reviewable, archived format. Thanks for your articles!
Bill Gribble
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