On 4 March 2011 04:04, James Harrison <[email protected]> wrote: > > It's a very neat thing technically though. I'd suggest that having > some form of (optional?) numbering for headings/subheadings etc would > be helpful - most legislation and legal documents and constitutions > and such tends to be organized into sections with lists of points > below. If you're looking to expand into the field of drafting > legislation this would be a great place to start expanding into that. >
That's what I was (not very clearly) alluding to. Getting numbering right is a hard problem, so if you do it I'd strongly advise taking advice from a lawyer (I'm happy to help) or legislation drafter about the sorts of requirements we have and the requirements legislation places on numbering systems. I have variously drafted numbered documents (mostly contracts) in openoffice, word and html (with css) and its quite clear that the developers of all three systems did not bother to speak to the profession that essentially invented the numbered list :-). A specific point that's relevant to bill drafting. Unless you have a way to link clause and sub-clause numbers and have a way to automatically renumber them, legislation of any size will rapidly become meaningless as people edit it. Numbering is not merely decorative, but serves the same purpose as id attributes in XML/HTML, the difference being that generally a clause number is not a nonce but also a sequence number that is intended initially to be meaningful. So an editor who delete a clause (or adds one) should expect all clauses to renumber; and all links to those clauses to adjust. Now in principle both openoffice and word should be able to do this, but in practice neither of them get it right. This is, in part, because they view numbering as a kind of "add on" to existing paragraphs - a decoration - whereas to a lawyer the numbering is rather more essential than that. The practical effect is that cross-references get lost and documents get muddled, whereas it should be possible to design an architecture where that is impossible (and I see no reason why that shouldn't be). HTML (up to 4, I haven't looked at 5 enough) + CSS is not sufficiently flexible to allow proper numbering. -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
