Linking to Clauses within a Contract

["John McClure" <jmcclure@hypergrove.com>]

Hello,

I ran some tests of linking to generated presentation material (below, and attached). These were successful, contrary to my earlier assertions that were based on what were apparently flawed tests. Accordingly, I am re-issuing my recommendations for our requirements document. As some of you will be happy to hear: I am agreeing that we should NOT be concerned with encodings in any of the presentation dialects XHTML, SVG, XSL-FO, or XForms.

Regards,
John

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Linking to Clauses within a Contract

Background

I have long been concerned about the impact should an attorney or judge be unable to link to an XML element that is in material generated dynamically, such as, by action of an XSL stylesheet. Here is a common scenario that must be accommodated by our standards: an attorney receives a letter that cites a clause within a contract. The letter-writer wants that citation to be an hyperlink to the clause. Are we creating a standard that facilitates or defeats this common scenario?

The tests below were created to provide a sandbox for showing that links to generated material simply don't work. They were created in support of recommendations I've today made to the LegalXML eContracts TC regarding compartmentalizing markup of XML documents that the TC would purport to be useable by the general public as contractual material vs contract documents that are encoded in a so-called presentation dialect (SVG, XSL-FO, XHTML, and XForms).

The results were surprising to me, as I think they will be for you.

LinkTests.zip