legalxml-courtfiling — archive

[Rolly Chambers]

Hi Don - I'm assuming that "subsetting the DTD" refers to the proposal to provide a simplified CD 1.1 DTD or CD 1.1 "lite." You probably are aware that the Todd Vincent who expressed the "over-inclusive but optional" approach to developing the Court Filing 1.1 DTD is the same Todd Vincent who, after working with the CF 1.1 DTD in the GCAC interoperability pilot, wrote the "Lessons Learned" document. That paper suggests that "It may, therefore, make sense for individual jurisdictions to create a 'backwards-compatible subset' of the Court Filing DTD for specific purposes and requirements." For clarification, is your concern that "subsetting" the CD 1.1 DTD should not be addressed in the CD 1.1 spec itself but should be left to individual jurisdictions to address via court policy standards? It sounds like the worry is that subsetting the CD 1.1 DTD as part of the Court Document specification may intrude upon and get crosswise with court policy standards. Or is your concern broader - that there should never be subsetting of the CD 1.1 DTD either by individual jurisdictions or by the CD 1.1 spec? As far as the Court Document proposal goes, the aim is to offer a single simplified CD 1.1 DTD (not multiple subsets) as something purely optional and perhaps easier to get started with than taking on the full CD 1.1 DTD. The object is to trim from the full CD 1.1 DTD elements and attributes that are optional and not frequently used in most court documents, such as the "notarization," "personIdentification" and "organizationIdentification" elements, some of the optional attributes, etc. The assumption is that it might be easier to start learning with a simpler subset of the full DTD. The tradeoff is that a simplified DTD would be useful for validating basic, "plain vanilla" XML court documents but not those requiring the richer markup in the full DTD. Of course, maybe you are suggesting that simplifying the CD 1.1 DTD won't make it any easier to learn and is not worth pursuing. Finally, are you concerned that some features of the proposed simplified CD 1.1 DTD make it an improper subset of the full DTD? If there are some specific "bloopers" in the simplified Court Document DTD, please let us know what they are. I'm much more receptive to correction from my friends than from strangers. Thanks for sharing the comments. Rolly