Re: Linking to stylesheets in XML

Peter Flynn wrote:
> 
> [legal docs]
> > I've heard this often, so I don't doubt its veracity.  Does anyone
> > know of anywhere with legal requirements for document _display_, or
> > are these only for print.
> 
> IMHE they are often not actually required by statute, just conventions
> that have been around so long they have acquired the status of law.
> This is certainly true of three cases I have been involved with (in the
> UK, France, and Austria). In the USA, though, they may have been
> codified, or be the subject of governmental regulations if not actual
> law.
> 
> But this all belongs in a stylesheet: did I miss something?
> 
> ///Peter

Lets not think that many legal systems recognise that what we 
from SGML-land think of as a document (something that can somehow be
representation-independent) is what they consider a document.
Quite the contrary.

I heard a talk a couple of years ago from a Taiwanese professor,
who said that in Confucian-law contries (CJK), *only* the sealed 
physical paper version of the document was considered the
document: not a fax, not a photocopy, and certainly not an
abstracted version. So to be useful, SGML documents needed to
carry around enough formatting information to allow them to
be printed sealed (stamped), and after that they needed to 
have information to nominate the actual document.

Presumably this will all change at some stage with reliable electronic
signatures. I don't know enough to know whether this is something
that XML should concern itself with, though.

Rick Jelliffe

Received on Thursday, 24 April 1997 06:06:44 UTC