Simon Willison’s Weblog

Today I learned - via a proposal to remove mentions of XSLT from the HTML spec - that congress.gov uses XSLT to serve XML bills as XHTML - here's H. R. 3617 117th CONGRESS 1st Session for example.

View source on that page and it starts like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="billres.xsl"?>
<!DOCTYPE bill PUBLIC "-//US Congress//DTDs/bill.dtd//EN" "bill.dtd">
<bill bill-stage="Introduced-in-House" dms-id="H5BD50AB7712141319B352D46135AAC2B" public-private="public" key="H" bill-type="olc"> 
<metadata xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<dublinCore>
<dc:title>117 HR 3617 IH: Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act of 2021</dc:title>
<dc:publisher>U.S. House of Representatives</dc:publisher>
<dc:date>2021-05-28</dc:date>
<dc:format>text/xml</dc:format>
<dc:language>EN</dc:language>
<dc:rights>Pursuant to Title 17 Section 105 of the United States Code, this file is not subject to copyright protection and is in the public domain.</dc:rights>
</dublinCore>
</metadata>
<form>
<distribution-code display="yes">I</distribution-code> 
<congress display="yes">117th CONGRESS</congress><session display="yes">1st Session</session> 
<legis-num display="yes">H. R. 3617</legis-num> 
<current-chamber>IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES</current-chamber>

Digging into those XSLT stylesheets leads to billres-details.xsl - gist copy here - which starts with a huge changelog comment with notes dating all the way back to 2004!