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Forgive me for not understanding the complexity of legislation.
Two questions:
1) Before these folks had WYSIWYG systems, how was it done?
2) How did they learn to deal with computers in general and a WYSIWYG
system in particular?
My guess is that they have already gone though a significant paradigm
shift (and survived).
Yes, you are missing a vital point. In general, typography, layout, and
design have always been used to communicate semantics. However, those
semantic relationships are only obvious to people. Sometimes, such as
apparently is the case with legislation, those semantics are only
obvious to a trained few. Creating rules to process the visual semantics
into a form that's easily read and understood by programs is a pretty
tough proposition. I used to write programs in Perl and Omnimark to do
just that sort of thing from word processor files. It's nasty and never
100% right.
It's also quite possible to create an editing application that does the
translation from the visual cues put in by the authors in a WYSIWYG
environment to XML. Programs such as Epic and Xmetal have scripting
capabilities that allow for that, albeit with a very large effort.
Maybe that's a great solution for your application (and it would be a
very lucrative consulting gig).
My original question was aimed not at legislators, but at technical
writers. We're supposed to be a trifle more flexible than senators, and
perhaps it's a little easier for us to shift our paradigms.
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