We introduce here LegalHTML, an extension of the HTML language thought for representing legal acts. LegalHTML has been conceived in the context of an exploratory study conducted for the Publications Office of the European Union, with the objective of overcoming the proliferation of formats for the electronic redaction of legal acts, dedicated to different steps of the editorial process (e.g. first draft, content editing, proof reading, introducing semantics, publishing) and of realizing a model and a language that could bind all processes and exigencies under a common umbrella. LegalHTML satisfies these requirements by providing an explicit domain language addressing all structural aspects of an act, such as articles, paragraphs, items, references and an associated ontology (foreseeing both inline annotations through RDFa and explicit RDF code within script elements) providing rich semantics to describe the editorial and jurisdictional history of the act and to insert references to entities of the domain. Being based on HTML, presentation is also offered by the same language, an aspect missing from all most notable standards for the legal domain. Furthermore, LegalHTML addresses consolidation of an act and its subsequent modifications into a single document using a tree-based representation of the original content and of its modified versions. Finally, alongside the language & ontology, we implemented a CSS stylesheet for the default rendering of LegalHTML documents and a JavaScript file imbuing documents with an API supporting TOC generation, footnote cross-references and the said point-in-time visualization of consolidated legal acts.

我们在这里介绍 LegalHTML，它是 HTML 语言思想的扩展，用于表示法律行为。LegalHTML 是在为欧盟出版局进行的一项探索性研究的背景下构思的，其目标是克服法律行为电子编辑格式的扩散，致力于编辑过程的不同步骤（例如初稿） 、内容编辑、校对、引入语义、出版）以及实现可以将所有流程和紧急情况绑定在一个共同的保护伞下的模型和语言。LegalHTML 通过提供明确的领域语言来满足这些要求，该语言解决了行为的所有结构方面，例如文章、段落、项目、参考文献和相关本体（预见通过 RDFa 的内联注释和脚本元素中的显式 RDF 代码），为描述该法案的编辑和管辖历史，并插入对该域实体的引用。由于基于 HTML，表示也由相同的语言提供，这是法律领域所有最著名的标准所缺少的一个方面。此外，LegalHTML 使用原始内容及其修改版本的基于树的表示来解决将法案及其后续修改合并到单个文档中的问题。最后，除了语言和本体之外，我们还实现了一个 CSS 样式表，用于默认呈现 LegalHTML 文档，以及一个 JavaScript 文件，该文件使用支持 TOC 生成、脚注交叉引用和上述合并法律行为的时间点可视化的 API 来填充文档。