Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?

Should be at fun little XML parser to write, converting the thing to HTML.

Except that it's a government thing so the parser's probably not going to be little. :)

Edit: The thing's basically XHTML without any kind of header. UTF-8 encoding, it looks like. So a conversion tool would just need to wrap it up and add styling.

Edit: Despite hints that it's XHTML, it's not valid XHTML.

Edit: Stick this at the top of the file:

--------------------- 8

    

    

    H. R. 1

    
    body {
        max-width: 40em;
        margin: auto;
    }
    .lbexTocSectionOLC {
        display: inline-block;
    }
    .lbexTocDivisionOLC {
        margin-top: 5ex;
    }
    

--------------------- 8And add this to the bottom of the file:

--------------------- 8

--------------------- 8I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to write a script to do that. Automatically extracting the bill title should be Fun.

What did you have in mind for viewing options?

See https://www.govinfo.gov/bulkdata/BILLS/resources. Specifically the billres.xsl and associated stylesheets. You can use those with the Saxon XSLT processor to transform the XML files into a HTML view similar to what the PDFs look like.

There's also https://www.govinfo.gov/bulkdata/FR/resources for federal register XML documents.

Note: it could be worth checking the issues at https://github.com/usgpo/bulk-data/issues as some of those contain fixes and formatting improvements.

Paste the entire thing into the LLM! Maybe people can stop relying on unreliable partisan sources to interpret bills if they have tools to grok the dense weird language in them themselves. I say this even though I was embarrassed yesterday when the LLM misinterpreted something and I posted it - read the reference text behind any summary :/