CTO Articles
Published in IT World
September 20, 2005
Oyez! Oyez! RSS!
By Sean Mc Grath
I spend a goodly proportion of my working life in the company of legal and regulatory documents. They provide an endless source of fascination for incorrigible data modelers, markup technologists and armchair philosophers like me.
Part of the fascination with legal texts is that most corpora I deal with have significant historical dimensions to them. It is not unusual for legal texts that date from hundreds of years ago to still be in force today. As you move from documents with a 2005 vintage to documents with an 1801 vintage, some interesting changes in document production technology can be observed - to put it very mildly.
It is also fascinating to see the extent to which the old maxim that the more things change, the more things stay the same, is timelessly true. The personalities of the people and the society in which they lived, shines through in the legal texts they write. People today are just like people were three hundred years ago. The only real difference is that we have electric coffee grinders and they did not.
Less flippantly, we have electronic publishing technology and they did not. Yet the core artifacts - the laws themselves - are essentially the same as they always were.
Thinking about it, it seems to be that 'electronic publishing' has so far gone through two major revolutions. Thinking about legal texts (of all things!) has caused me to focus on a third electronic publishing wave I see forming on the horizon at the moment. To get to the third wave, we need to surf through the first two.
The first wave was the use of electronic mechanisms to improve the process of producing documents on paper. In other words, typesetting machines, word processors, desktop publishing packages and so on. These technologies revolutionized the process of authoring/editing but left the dissemination piece essentially the name - paper.
The second wave was the use of electronic mechanisms to improve the dissemination of electronic documents. For a while, physical media were used most notably CD-ROMs. These days, purely electronic dissemination over the Internet is the norm.
The first wave did not have any great implications for the content of legal texts. The second wave - the one crashing over us right now - carries with it some interesting implications for the content. The reason being that a rising tide floats all boats. The emerging pre-eminence of electronic dissemination mechanisms impacts more than just legislation. It impacts all forms of text, most notably newspapers.
From time to time in a legal text you will find references to mechanisms for informing the public about important events. Examples include notices of upcoming elections, notices of planning applications, government-issued tenders and so on.
Historically, a good way to make sure that the public are informed about something is to mandate the publication of information in prominent newspapers and other such paper-based publications.
Now, in a world where more and more newspapers are going on-line and a bigger and bigger segment of the populace no longer reads newspapers on paper because they read everything on-line, how do you ensure wide distribution of important public information?
Will we see legislation coming into existence that specifies the URLs that public notices must be posted to? I think it is inevitable. URLs with legal status? That will be interesting for us armchair philosophers.
Of more pragmatic interest is the third wave I mentioned. I don't know about you but my reading habits have changed dramatically over the last few years. These days, I now mostly read sources of news only when I know something new has been published in my fields of interest. I can do this because all day long, I have my RSS feed aggregator window open and I get notified instantly when anything interesting is published.
It is as if I have my own little merry band of helpers that forage around the town squares, gathering news from the Town Criers [1], reading the posters pinned to the shop windows, pore over the newspapers and then report anything interesting back to me.
RSS feeds prescribed by statute? That will be very interesting. The way the third wave is taking shape, it is only a matter of time.