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At 01:27 PM 7/5/99 -0400, David Megginson wrote: >Tim Bray writes: > > > It's an interesting area of work though - the notion that you can > > finalize a weighty legal transaction (loan application, purchase > > order) by filling in an HTML form and sending a bunch of > > context-free name/value pairs to port 80 somewhere is pretty deeply > > inconsistent with business culture as we know it > >The same problems exist with electronic forms whether or not they are >presented on the screen so that they look like paper forms Emulating paper isn't the issue; making the transaction admissable as evidence is. That is why XFDL for example insists on including in the form document all the presentational information and so on - the claim is that you have to digitally sign not only the answers to the questions but the questions and how they were presented to the user, in order to achieve the goal of non-repudiation. (Mind you, this should be done using CSS or flow objects rather than with custom tags as XFDL did). As a legal illiterate, I'm not sure what the real state of play is here - but I still think that a list of context-free name/value pairs is a pretty shaky basis for a legally binding transaction. -T. xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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