How Citable Public Documents Will Change Your Life | Hacker News Reader

How Citable Public Documents Will Change Your Life

radar.oreilly.com

47 pointsbootload8 comments

I've often wanted a way to reference web documents at the paragraph level in general, since most web documents don't include many anchors (<a name="here"/>), that you can use in the URL with a "#" ("#here").

One solution I tried was to write a greasemonkey script that would add anchors to all headings, using their text as the name.

Another solution is to google for a unique string in the paragraph you want, then use google's cached version of the page. This highlights the text, but doesn't actually add an anchor. eg: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:L9bpHCe...

A webservice to add anchors for every paragraph is pretty simple (probably several already exist) - but I think it would be a great addition to the html standard itself so that, in effect, each paragraph gets an URL.

To paraphrase the guy from the thread on Visa predicting divorce [1]: Slightly off-topic: if you post something with a misleading title that you can improve, please do so. This article has no real information on how citable public documents will change your life, just the assertion that they will and that you should help.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1249539

Perfect summary! The linked article was almost information free.

There is more information on their wiki. The elevator-pitch version is here: http://citability.pbworks.com/Onepager

IMO, it goes off the deep end after the WHY section. The scientific community has been dealing with the issue of citability for a couple of decades now (that I have witnessed) but, it seems like the folks at citability.org are intent on reinventing the wheel on this one.

FWIW, the legal community has been dealing with citability for a few centuries.

In criminal cases, people's lives are on the line. In class-action civil lawsuits, billions of dollars are at stake.

This wheel most-definitely does not need re-inventing.

Flagging this article for it's total lack of content.

That's a false analogy. The legal community deals with well-documented, stable, and easily cited statutes. There are strong incentives driving clear presentation of current law. The objectives outlined in the OP would not be served by those incentives, because they are concerned with all government documents, whether they have made their way into law yet or not. Such documents can be unstable and hard to find, so providing clearinghouse through which they can be cited in a time-aware fashion would be incredibly useful for tracking the evolution of proposed laws.

I was talking about citations on the web but agree with your point. Quick access to cited material means more time devoted to solving the client's problem (or serving more clients - both are good outcomes).

Good arguments in general (though yes, careful not to reinvent any wheels here...) but to me the most important thing I got out of the article was the link to

League of Technical Voters http://www.leagueoftechvoters.org/

which is a great idea.

if you want more meat - go the the wiki where the projects are and the links to the code

http://dccodeathon.pbworks.com or readup more at http://citability.pbworks.com

after the event I will post all the links to source code. There isn't much yet only discussions about architecture.

We don't require anyone to follow any standards - and we aren't reinventing the wheel. We are just dressing up the distributed versioning wheel for govt people so they can understand it. That is why I think we can get it done in a weekend. Re-inventing a wheel takes more than that...:-)

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