Federal Register Becomes Available In XML
By: Doug Caverly
We’ll leave religion out of this, but otherwise, it appears that XML has friends in the highest of places. The National Archives and Records Administration and the U.S. Government Printing Office have decided to publish the Federal Register in XML.
The Federal Register might be considered the American government’s official newspaper; it follows the movements of different federal agencies, along with the executive branch. It was created 73 years ago, and currently puts out about 80,000 pages per year.
Impressive, right? So it was nice to see Ray Mosley, the Director of the Federal Register at the National Archives and Records Administration, place XML on a bit of a pedestal.
He wrote in a post on the White House’s blog, “XML is a simple and flexible, machine-readable form of text that is easy to manipulate with software,” and said that it’ll save the government time and money.
Mosley also explained, “With an XML edition, independent organizations can reorganize the Register’s contents in ways that are more meaningful to you and address your personal interests; track issues that are likely to affect your community or your profession; and even engage in real-time public discussions about its contents with others across the country and around the world.”
A lot of people will probably be introduced to XML thanks to this move. Hopefully it’ll lead to further adoption.