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cc-devel - Re: [cc-devel] Legal code and technical implementation: your input wanted

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Subject: Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

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  • From: Dan Mills <dan AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: Nathan Yergler <nathan AT yergler.net>
  • Cc: "cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org" <cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-devel] Legal code and technical implementation: your input wanted
  • Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:01:00 -0700

On Thursday, April 18, 2013 at 10:52 AM, Nathan Yergler wrote:
On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 9:32 AM, Mike Linksvayer <ml AT gondwanaland.com> wrote:
On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 3:57 PM, Kat Walsh <kat AT creativecommons.org> wrote:
If we were to do this, the legal code would be maintained in a separate file
from the HTML, in a format that maintained all of the essential information.
For example, formatting such as bold or italic text that has legal
significance, section headings, etc., would all be considered essential and
part of the legal code itself. This legal code file would likely be
maintained using Markdown[1], or something similar to it.

The web page with the licenses would be generated from this legal code file,
by converting it to HTML and adding non-legal code formatting, text, and
navigational elements. However, since the legal code file would not have to
be touched, it would be impossible to accidentally make a change to the
legal code itself by changing other elements of the page.

I may have suggested something like this long ago, but I'd probably
stick to HTML as the canonical version now. That canonical HTML should
be as minimal as possible, just including enough structure and
annotation to make it possible for external CSS and _javascript_ to make
look pretty and dynamically add further annotation in a variety of
contexts, and for plain text to be generated without manual post
processing.

While you could continue to use _javascript_, etc for injecting that
sort of customization, I think the burden for creating and maintaining
that sort of code is greater than that for a script that takes a
template document and runs in the actual content.

I very much agree. Client-side JS absolutely has its place, and I have no problems with using it (heavily, if needed), but it's not some sort of escape hatch for modifying pages without modifying the page that is served up. That's just obfuscation, and it's harder to maintain.

Regardless of the markup format for the "immutable" document, I think
my primary concern is making it easy for a software agent to "follow
its nose" from the license URI to the immutable legalcode. (I
*thought* there was follow-your-nose markup from the deed to the
legalcode, but I don't see it now, so maybe I'm mis-remembering.)
Figuring out what the right predicate is shouldn't be super difficult,
and would fit in the existing ecosystem.

Were you thinking of a link? "The license on this page was generated from [link]" ?
 

For what it's worth, we added support for "stripped down" legalcode in
2010 (I think). For example,
file is generated from the static HTML, and having
markdown/restructured text/something less expressive would have made
life a little easier.

Hah.

Yeah, so that plain format could be close to being acceptable as a *source* if we really want to use HTML (modulo the stylesheet and JS tags).

Dan



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