Re: Posting Ken Starr's report to the Internet

["Huber, Mike" <mrhuber -at- SOFTWARE -dot- ROCKWELL -dot- COM>]

> From: Stephen D. Murphy [mailto:sdmurphy -at- SHEPARD-PATTERSON -dot- COM]

> No, this is not a political message! I'm just curious. Think about how
> long it takes for most of us to create web content. Congress
> just voted
> to release thousands of pages of material, and they expect to
> have it on
> the Internet this afternoon. Wow!

It takes us a long time to make usable, organized, formatted, linked web
content. But legal documents that I've seen on the web tend to be a solid
wall of courier text. I can crank that out in seconds, given a raw ASCII
file. Those who care to read the document will do so regardless of the
format.
I expect that what we  (well, those of us who are going to look it up - I
have other plans) see this afternoon will be a set of very large, crudely
formatted, documents.   One of the factors we tend to miss in audience
analysis is the level of audience motivation. Audience motivation can
significantly reduce the need for navigation the and formatting work that
takes us so long. The organizational work has been done over the last few
months.
Or perhaps the staff has been using a very good single-sourcing system.

> Other than just scanning the pages and dumping them in a web
> page as raw
> text, I wonder how one would approach this problem from a technical
> standpoint?

I suppose most of the text is already in a computer - I doubt that the staff
is using typewriters.
I think any scanning has already been done.

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