Senate Bill No. 2464 Available for Viewing Online
By Rico, 9:09 am Wed Sep 17 2008 - Editorial - 2 Opinions
A few months ago, Senator Manny Villar introduced Bill No. 2464 in the Senate, naming it the Anti-Obscenity and Pornography Act of 2008. Someone has posted it in its entirety online, making it available for public reading via Scribd.
The only reason why I’m writing about this is because I think the way Philippine legislature publicizes proposed bills (at the very least) has room for improvement.
Currently, the Philippine website makes these bills available for download, through the popular PDF format. But I wonder, why not just encode the bill itself, and make it available on a web page as plain text? It’s not like legal documents feature pictures, and plain text is a lot easier to download than PDFs.
Better yet, it’s possible to provide both options. Those who just want to view the bill can just visit the web page, while those who want to a copy for later reading can always download the PDF. What do you think?
To be fair, the fact that the Philippine Senate already makes legal documents available online is a good thing in itself. View Bill 2464 here, or as mentioned above, a download is also available on the Philippine Senate website.
Eugene
9:09 pm Wed Sep 17 2008
I wish the PDF had text instead of a scanned facsimile that still needs to be OCRd.
Rico
10:10 pm Wed Sep 17 2008
Ah yes, that definitely should be changed! Simply encoding scans also takes up more space.