Understanding Electronic Publication

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Understanding Electronic Publication

The SI template is the front-end of an electronic workflow that helps to enable simultaneous publication of both electronic and print formats of an SI. The electronic format is held in XML (Extensible Markup Language) that is valid to the Legislation Schema.  This XML is used to prepare HTML for publication on the legislation.gov.uk website and other legal databases.

Before you start – Interacting with the SI Template

Anyone interacting with a document drafted on the SI Template should ideally have the latest SI Template installed on their computer.  This helps to ensure that users do not introduce validation errors to the document - even opening a templated SI without having the template installed can sometimes cause the SI to become invalid.  As part of the submission process for registration and onward publication includes validation of the template SI document, it is important to ensure that you do not inadvertently introduce errors to the SI.

Preparation of the SI document

The printed Statutory Instrument should be regarded as a by-product of the publication process since it is a correctly structured XML file that is more important for electronic publication.  The content within the word document is the SI, rather than the printed page.  The way the content is “marked up”, using paragraph and character styles, controls the electronic output.  Unfortunately, limitations of Microsoft Word make it difficult to distinguish between something that “looks right” and something that is correctly marked-up.

Validation is a process by which a document can be tested to determine if it will produce a valid electronic file. The legislation.gov.uk Publishing system provides an online validation service for users to validate their documents after making changes prior to the SI being submitted for registration and onward publication.  After finalisation of the SI and the inclusion of signature(s) and made, laid and coming in force dates, users are encouraged to send the document for validation. This will check that there were no errors upon receipt of the SI from the drafter, nor have any been inadvertently introduced.

Further information on validation can be found in the Validation Toolbox.

Processing of the SI Document

During submission of an SI for registration and publication, the legislation.gov.uk Publishing system will perform a final validation check.  After registration is completed and providing no errors have been identified (or only low impact errors have been found and the department has authorised these to be corrected) then the SI will be processed for electronic and print publication.  Any SI where high impact errors are identified will be returned to the user for correction and resubmission.  Any delays in correcting these errors can impact the publication date of the SI.

The content of the SI Word document is converted to an XML file. Some elements within the document (images, forms, formulae) will be extracted as images. The XML file is validated against the Legislation Schema – the electronic representation of the permitted structure of a Statutory Instrument.

The XML is then transformed to HTML to be uploaded to the legislation.gov.uk website and made available to other legal systems. The PDF, from which printed copies are made, is another by product of this process.

Importance of a Correctly Formatted Document

Every action applied to text including character styles, fonts, formatting, is stored in Word using invisible tags. All tags have to be converted to the Legislation Schema format. If the tags are incorrect or missing, the electronic output will also be incorrect.

For example, a laid date keyed as “1st January 2008” is converted to a tag <ukm:Laid Date="2008-01-01" Class="UnitedKingdomParliament"/>.

If the incorrect date paragraph style were used, then this would be converted to a different date string. If the formatting was not as expected, then the correct digits could not be extracted. This error would not be apparent by visual inspection of the text but would result in an invalid electronic file being produced.