- From: Harvey Bingham <hbingham@ACM.org>
- Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 18:52:16 -0400
- To: w3c-wai-wg@w3.org
At 11:41 1997/05/20 -0400, Al Gilman wrote: >...The place where I fall off the track laid down >by T.V. [Raman] has to do with making references to print versions in >the accepted indexing medium of the print realm. > >[picking up the quote from T.V.] > > Daniel-- so you have some background about IPP and BPP: > > The ICADD 22 was designed to help in the production of etexts and > braille texts --these were necessarily looking at documents that had > already been published. > This is why tags representing post-processing information such as IPP > and BPP made their way into that DTD. [BPP] in that draft was just PP. For symmetry Murray's notes made it BPP to make clear that both Braille and Ink page numbers may be needed. In general, there are several BPP per IPP. > > As you point out, these do not have a place except in the printing > spec, and I'd redirect this to that working group. > >[Al, here...] > >This is where my agreement breaks down. Specifically, "these do >not have a place except in the printing spec" goes too far. The >Braille user with an ICADD 22 document can get an answer to the >question "Where am I in the print-version coordinates?" That >question should be answerable by some mechanism we support. It >is not just a matter of instructing the printing device. This is >required for coordination [over the phone] by people using print >and Braille variants of the same document. The same goes for >print and Web versions of the same document. Braille users are >not the only users needing cross-index or coordinate >tranformation services. The transformation services could use IPP or BPP, though both are coarse finding aids. > >Compare this with the issue of the West Publishing copyright on >the pagination that is required as the means of indexing in court >proceedings in the U.S. > >-- >Al Gilman > > Thanks for this insight. It is quite pertinent. A significant reference for that is: http://www.abanet.org/citation/ On August 6, 1996, the American Bar Association's House of Delegates favorably passed a motion for a universal citation system recommendation to the courts. The Resolution from Report No. 107 recommends that courts adopt a universal citation system using sequential decision numbers for each year and internal paragraph numbers within the decision. The numbers should be assigned by the court and included in the decision at the time it is made publicly available by the court. It also recommends that parallel citations to commonly used print sources be strongly encouraged. The Citation system is equally adaptable to printed and electronic case reports and is thus medium neutral. The standard form of citation, shown for a decision in a federal court of appeals, should be: Smith v. Jones, 1996 5Cir 15, ¶18, 22 F.3d 955. 1996 is the year of the decision; 5Cir refers to the United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit; 15 indicates that this citation is to the 15th decision released by the court in the year; 18 is the paragraph number where the material referred to is located, and the remainder is the parallel citation to the volume and page in the printed case report where the decision may also be found. Another reference is: http://law.wuacc.edu/aallnet/citeform.html March 1, 1995 Report, AALL Task Force on Citation Formats American Association of Law Libraries I paraphrase its lengthy content: Objective: medium-neutral, vendor-neutral, and in the public domain. Recommendation: Document references are sequential by year by court by decision. Sequentially numbered paragraphs are the primary internal "pinpoint" targets. West Law is again' it; they have a vested interest and have copyrighted their page numbers from their printed versions. Lawyers have been doing it their way for over a century. Lawyers and judges know how to use their system. Paper remains the medium for the origin of documents with legal effect. Issues for Generalization: Above applies to persistent, static legal information. It gets that way after initial versions are final edited and eventually signed by a judge. Adding numbers thereafter could mess up copyfitting and page breaks. Paper publishing was the durable medium of choice for centuries. Page number referencing was OK as that was all there was. Old law on paper is difficult to reliably scan/OCR to become electronic. When done, folio numbers are often at the end of the page, not before them. Paragraph numbering is finer-grain than page, but subject to ambiguity when done algorithmically. Should these be numbered: headings, bulleted items in a list, block quotes, display equations within a logical paragraph? Many electronic documents are dynamic. No sequential paragraph numbering scheme would survive revisions, without gaps and sub-numbering injections. Reorderings would get original numbering out of order. Different renditions of electronic documents may have different content or ordering [e.g., some may be text-only, some may have alt text in place of images, some may have D pointers to descriptive text. Some may have other footnotes by reference vs. by inclusion, some may have footnotes "nearby", others as endnotes gathered either by division or by document.] An SGML way could assign a unique identifier to each tag. A means to have fractional numbers would allow injections. Missing numbers would indicate omitted materials. [The military hierarchic numbering of divisions and subdivisions is a long-standing model for this, possibly to include a comment about the range of deleted material.] A hierarchic naming scheme should be able to grow outward, as when one numbered division becomes part of a new parent, or possibly part of two different parents. These indicate that the id "uniqueness" is a hard problem. So, the IPP BPP issues, when viewed in a larger context, are the URN issues. The original purpose for IPP and BPP was locators between dissimilar media for rendition. The finer grain pinpoint location to paragraph of the legal citations would be useful here as well. Presence of such pinpoint location as a general practice would be useful for universal design, not just accessibility. Regards/Harvey Bingham
Received on Tuesday, 20 May 1997 18:52:19 UTC