Our Mission

Legal-XHTML is hosted by a non-profit organzation that is sponsored by legal firms, software companies, and others who want to represent legal documents using the Extensible HyperText Markup Language, Version 2 (XHTML-2). Technical material is provided here, and at the Legal XHTML Google group, to supports these goals:

1. To recommend technical solutions for issues related to using XHTML-2 to encode legal and other documents. The entire lifecycle applicable to legal documents on the web is within scope, including their creation, display, editing, negotiation, signing, exchange, abstraction, maintenance, archiving, and renewal.
2. To encourage the use of the Legal RDF vocabularies in an XHTML-2 context. These vocabularies, the most comprehensive published today on the Web, are suited specifically to the needs of legal and other related documents.
3. To publish the Legal-XHTML Module, as free & open-source material. This module contains a small number of special-purpose tags relevant to legal documents, extending the set of tags provided by XHTML-2.
4. To publish sample XHTML2-encoded legal documents, including jurisdictional codes (and regulations), civil law documents (contracts, wills, notices, and others), official documents (certificates and licenses), and court documents (briefs and writs).
5. To publicize the availability of both open-source and proprietary Modular XHTML tools; community adoption of the Legal-XHTML tags; and whitepapers and other material important to those adopting XHTML technologies for legal and related documents.

A companion web-site also sponsored by the Legal-XHTML organization, http://www.Legal-RDF.org, and an associated Legal RDF Google group, focus on the development of a controlled vocabulary that is recommended to be used by legal documents encoded in XHTML-2.

Community Vision

Today most documents on the Internet are tagged using the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). However, the remarkable benefits of using dialects of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) are compelling all document publishers to consider how best to migrate their documents to XML. There are two alternatives: use an XML dialect built specifically for text documents, or use the W3C's conversion of HTML into an XML dialect, XHTML.

The "XHTML choice" is more likely because XHTML provides all the benefits of XML without incurring significant costs of developing new dialects, adopting new skills, redeveloping current HTML applications, developing or purchasing new dialect-specific tools, nor overcoming operational disadvantages associated with displaying non-XHTML documents (and input forms) by Internet Explorer, Firefox, and other browsers. Beyond technical considerations, far less marketing is necessary to make XHTML a standard as widely used as that achieved today by its non-XML cousin, HTML.

Legal-XHTML exists to facilitate the broad adoption of XHTML by the legal industry. It seeks to provide (1) a forum for all stakeholders to reach consensus about operational challenges arising in a multi-dialect environment; (2) guidance about business and technical processes affected by use of the XHTML dialect; and (3) free and open-source tools built specifically for processing legal documents encoded in XHTML.

Powerful analytic and document management tools are most easily applied if all documents produced by governments; all those electronically filed with governments; and all those written (and reviewed) by legal professionals during the course of criminal, civil, and economic transactions; are all tagged using XHTML. The alternative -- document libraries featuring a garden-variety of XML dialects -- is unacceptable in a time of heightened competitive and financial pressures.

Two Common Questions

Is Legal-XHTML discouraging innovation by promoting a one-size-fits-all?

Is Legal-XHTML discouraging use of Open Office, Microsoft, and other similar tools?