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Subject: Legal Blob


In order to achieve some of the aims of the Vision Statement, it seems that it's
being proposed to have two simple elements -- one for a legal blob of text and
images, and one for the single container in which it is located.

The requirements for such a legal blob container seem to include:
1. A blob container must be able to contain blob containers
2. All other requirements applicable to a blob are equally applicable to their
container, eg captioning and indentation requirements, with one exception: a
blob container may not contain or reference any text strings or images that
comprise the content of the contract.

I remain concerned that the choice of this architecture means that a DTD used by
DTD-driven editors will not show anything beyond "Legal Blob" and "Legal Blob
List". From a technical perspective, it's unclear about the effect that the
proposal will reduce my development requirements, but at least it has the
redeeming virtue of establishing the functional requirements for anything said
to be a variant of a Legal Blob or a Legal Blob Container. This sounds so much
like SGML Arch Forms, I'm sure though with the thought to implement via XML
Schema's single inheritance facility, however there are other ways. As
mentioned, a multitude of DTDs could be written, each with the necessary Arch
Form attributes encoded as FIXED; I suggested on the call that a national level
of DTDs is quite appropriate to accommodate different cultural words -- this is
the standard way, and writing a transform would not be hard.

Secondly, we could and should investigate Modular XHTML as one way of achieving
the desired quick, cheap, and assured wide applicability to non-legal document
types, that is, to those non-professional documents that contain legal blobs of
information.

Building on prior art -- such as Modular XHTML -- is much smarter than the
present course.





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