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hamstar / legislat0r

An open source system for crowdsourcing creation and analysis of legislature
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Bills can have links added to them #52

Open hamstar opened 12 years ago

hamstar commented 12 years ago

From question #40

A bill should be able to have multiple links added to it. These would be displayed when viewing the bill.

jonlaing commented 12 years ago

Throwing this out there, I definitely see the advantages on the web, but eventually these are going to be sent the old-school way to the people's representatives yes? How would links play into that, especially if we're talking about trying to write our own legislation. Given the tumultuous nature of the internet and URL's is this addition prudent?

Just a thought.

fierce-bad-squirrel commented 12 years ago

It's easy to put together a print stylesheet which could remove links. We could also create a non-editable view of the bill as it stands (current state).

The linked references are really for usability in the editing process and to make it easier for users without experience in legislative drafting to understand all the implications, definitions and references without having to navigate back and forth within the bill to refresh their memory.

jonlaing commented 12 years ago

Got it. If that's the case, then I think it's a good idea. I wonder if we should discourage it in the actual bill, but encourage it in the discussion? Or even, each bill has a basic description, that could have all kinds of links, legal precedence, intended function of the bill, etc. I actually like the idea of having a description.

fierce-bad-squirrel commented 12 years ago

I've suggested bill summaries in #39. We could expand that concept to have the first couple of lines in a a bill description as the summary displayed with the list results, and then the full description attached to the bill interface.

In #40, I suggested a bibliography-style source/resource list, which could be another or supplimentary solution.

jonlaing commented 12 years ago

I think both of those suggestions might work better than having links in the actual text, just for the fact that the links can't go with the text. Maybe allowing citations to the bibliography. Like a Wikipedia style thing. Then when the bill is finally printed, citations disappear, and you just have its text by itself.

fierce-bad-squirrel commented 12 years ago

The only place I think internal references are useful is as described in #36 and #38, where the references are purely internal and reference term definitions and sections that impact one another. I've suggested a tool tip style hover interface, perhaps with footnote style superscript links (e.g., 1). (Hover over 1 to see the title attribute.) These would also disappear in the print view.

hamstar created a feature for this in #46. If we use js instead of the title attribute, we could include a link to the section of the text referenced, as well.

jonlaing commented 12 years ago

Cool, I like it.

hamstar commented 12 years ago

I think both of those suggestions might work better than having links in the actual text, just for the fact that the links can't go with the text.

I think I may have derped out on the wording of this feature. When I say add links I mean like the links aren't displayed in the bill text, but rather they would be models in their own right with link_category models.

Then it would show the links when viewing the bill down the side or something. Each link under a its respective category. I was thinking like the way that wordpress links work. If you look at http://knowyourcensor.com down the side you'll see there are three categories (contribute, links, reddits) and the links for each category are shown below them.