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Subject: RE: [legalxml-econtracts] Re: XHTML 2.0


Hi all,

I will post something early in the week as a possible approach. Just one
point dealing with Jason's initial comments to John's points on XHTML 2.0


>
> E.  Will XHTML 2.0 be the market behemoth several of us are
> assuming?  Will it
> sweep all before it, so that no other XML grammars are used for document
> authoring anymore?  If so, why didn't XHTML 1.0 have the same effect.
>

XHTML 1.0 added nothing much to ordinary HTML from the point of view of real
document production. It is almost pure presentation markup. It is OK for web
documents but useless for reliable content management and multi format
publishing. Of course XHTML 1.0 did not gain much traction in the space we
are working in.
XHTML 2.0 takes a new tack. It appears to provide a generic structural
markup that addresses many (but not all) of the objectives we are seeking
with a clause model. Clearly, its a new ball game.

If structural XML (as opposed to format based XML markup models such as
WordML) is to gain any widespread acceptance among document authors such as
lawyers, a complete infrastructure needs to evolve for this to happen. It
has always been my thesis that this is unlikely to occur unless the market
settles on a common schema. Without this, the costs of implementation around
proprietary schema are prohibitive and people can't do the most basic things
with XML documents they receive from others.

Until I became aware of the XHTML 2.0 draft, I believed there was a big
market space for a standard schema for structural markup of legal and
business documents, along the lines described in the clause model
requirements. There was no worthwhile generic structural model we could use
(sorry DocBook).

Now I am not going to predict that XHTML 2.0 will sweep everything before it
but I think we would have to be clear about what might happen and why.

It seems to me unlikely that XHTML 2.0 won't provide a general purpose
application that will be "good enough" for a wide range of needs. It is not
beautiful but it will do a lot. It builds on a huge base of HTML authoring.

There will always be space for specialised schema to meet particular
application needs. The issue in each case will be whether the development &
maintenance costs of a specialist application are justified by the benefits
conferred over those available from a more general purpose application.

I think we now have to justify a new clause model against XHTML 2.0 to see
if it is worthwhile for our application.

I think we need to be particularly clear about the users of our standard:

1. Do we expect that practising lawyers and other business document authors
should use structural XML authoring tools or will it be mainly used behind
the scenes so that most structural authoring is done by a relatively few
specialist content managers?

2. What benefits will our standard provide to practising lawyers that
requires them to use structural markup?

3. To what extent is it necessary to provide for the exchange of structural
XML documents (drafts or otherwise) between parties?

4. What sort of infrastructure will be needed by law firms and other user
enterprises to enable these processes?

We have not really answered these questions to this point. We (I) have made
some assumptions about point 1 (see topics 2.3 and 2.4 of my draft proposal
of 11 November 2003). We could afford to defer these issues because we
needed a new structural model in any event. Now I think we need to take a
more critical look at them.

I guess my angle on this is that the business and market context is more
important than the technical issues at this point.

Perhaps we should now complete the requirements process so we can answer
these questions (and others) and then make a better assessment of the
relative merits of various proposals against the business needs.

Regards
Peter




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