The first step must be to create a schema for the legal acts of the European Union. In LAF the schema is a DTD and acts are in XML. As an illustration, the LAF DTD would be the equivalent to the Internet Message Format; both are just formats, indispensable basic components to create their respective systems: a Seamless Legislative System (ยง 4.4) and a worldwide email system. Many other components are needed for a complete system.
The minimal deliveries must be:
Without any new development, one must be able to: write XML acts with a plain text editor such a Notepad; validate against the LAF DTD with an XML validator such as xmllint; create a presentation with CSS. This is particularly useful during the specification process, end users will have appropiate human interfaces. Just writing description documents without creating the DTD, CSS and XML act during the specification process is like writing recipes without cooking anything: an approach based only in description document is bound to fail. In addition, one must transcribe existing acts to XML, validate and compare the presentation with the original.
Illustrations:
The LAF DTD specifies the five types of legislative acts: regulations, directives, decisions, recommendations and opinions; if needed, it can be broken into modules. LAF DTD can be used directly or as common DTD module for individual per act type and per language DTDs (EN ES) to validate linguistic mandatory strings or to populate XML files (EN ES).
Generating in parallel all the linguistic versions of acts should be considered, though this out of scope of the specification and already in the domain of development; a neutral XML templates only with entities is the approach. These techniques applied to EU legal acts can also be applied to other document types.