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Subject: RE: [legalxml-courtfiling] Salt Lake minutes
I'd like to chime in with my concerns about the idea of a "DTD Lite."
The Court Document drafting committee has raised the question of "ease of use of" and "ease of learning" a specification as reasons for such a construct (I don't have a specific location I'm pointing to in the draft CD 1.1, but recall it's being asserted there). I admit to having not grasped the rationale for this.
I would not expect a non-technical, business expert to learn about the functionality, scope, and details of a specification by reading a DTD or Schema itself. Those of us advocating for standards, application developers, EFSPs, and others will need to provide written explanations, presentations, diagrams, and so forth, to promote such learning.
If the "Lite" version is necessary to "dumb down" the specification for use by certain application developers, I think there might be a problem with the developers. I do not understand what economy there would be in stripping some amount of ASCII text from a specification in order to "simplify" it, when that economy is contrasted with the potential costs from reconciling the kinds of errors Don has suggested might occur. Perhaps someone can explain this and convince me otherwise?
I feel it is a substantial and critical task of the Technical Committee to maintain its DTDs and Schemas entire and intact, to ensure they are accessible, reliable, valid, etc. If a particular application developer, court, etc., wants to build for local use a "Lite" version of the specification, they should be free to do so, but at their own risk. I do not think the Technical Committee should have "Heavy" and "Lite" versions of its products, particularly when those wanting the "Lite" version need only omit the elements they don't find relevant to their own uses. It should be up to them to keep their mini-specs valid against the official full-sized specs, which the Technical Committee would be responsible for.
I admit to ignorance regarding technical factors that might have motivated Todd or others to desire "Lite DTDs." I am willing to learn more about that, but need convincing on why it would be the responsibility of the Technical Committee to provide and maintain those variations. If you can't convince me on technical grounds due to my lack of such expertise, you could try persuading me by precedent - how, why, and with what effects (positive and negative) have other comparable specifications been developed and maintained in "full" and "lite" versions?
Regards,
Roger
Roger Winters Electronic Court Records Manager King County 516 Third Avenue, E-609 MS: KCC-JA-0609 Seattle, Washington 98104 V: (206) 296-7838 F: (206) 296-0906 roger.winters@metrokc.gov
-----Original Message-----
Rolly,
I agree with most of your points especially having this subset as a single OASIS LegalXML Standard or as a section of one. My concern is jurisdictional subsetting by individual courts could create an improper subsets. If you carry this out over a wider group jurisdictions the probability of error is higher. My further point is, at this time there is no straight forward software way of confirming that a subset is proper to assist the community. Subset DTDs become an object that must be change controlled and managed. The skill set to subset DTDs is often not present in a software developer therefore you may have more than one person in the loop with the attendant human communication and human error.
Many organizations that use more than one dtd (subset/superset) in a process-flow generate the DTDs from a single master source object.
There may be an impact on the EFPs, which would then have to manage the DTD Subsets from many Courts. This will induce more overhead on their part as they cross jurisdictions.
I have found that a metadata approach such as Court Policy can be made deterministic over time and has a lower human error rate. Additionally, if you use two ways of providing additional constraints (subsetting and Court Policy) two negative results can occur. The two constraint systems can have effects at the intersection that are subtle, hard to reveal plus hard to diagnose and remove when found. The second effect of this is as you optimize the Court Policy Constraint handler you only get part of the benefit that you might otherwise get.
Regards,
Don
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