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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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