Recently, we can see many pages concerned with laws of Japan on WWW (World Wide Web), i.e., the Constitution of Japan, the Civil Law, the Criminal Law, the Patent Law and so on. However, since these pages were mainly referred to the bodies of these laws only, we couldn't understand the concept, the purpose, the structure and detail contents of the law completely or easily. Then, the new system that offered information of the law related to agriculture effectively to farmers, officers in agriculture extension and education division, students, researchers, makers of fertilizers and fertilizer inspectors in official analysis stations, etc. through the Internet was developed with the new function, so-called frame function, of browser of WWW. This function was developed and offered by Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator later version 3.0, respectively. The Fertilizer Control Law of Japan was selected as the object of this study. The Fertilizer Control Law of Japan was enacted in 1950 so as to keep the quality of fertilizers and to secure fair commercial transaction. The system was composed of 77 pieces of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) text files and 66 pieces of GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) image files. These files were linked and they defined the structural relationship between a provision and another provision of the Fertilizer Control Law, a provision of this law and the government ordinance of this law, the government ordinance and ministerial ordinances of this law, ministerial ordinances and notifications of this law, respectively. By using the developed system, many users can confirm or understand the contents of the law easily on WWW. In addition, because the system is composed of plain text files described with HTML, the maintenance for correspondence to partial revision of the law can be facilitated by the system manager.
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