Stylesheets can also be created to work with DTDs to allow documents to be formatted as organizations wish. This means that the information in a judgment in Queensland can be 'tagged' in the same way as a judgment in New South Wales. However, the style in which a judgment is printed may vary between states. XML represents a shift in the way information is coded for the Web. The language offers a flexible, powerful means for describing data and the structure of that information, but not the way it looks in a browser.
Legal documents are about communicating information.
A person reading a legal opinion, for example, is concerned more with information the document communicates to the reader than the presentation of that document. Most electronic document formats in wide use today allow only for the storage of presentation information along with text. Lawyers use information from documents over and over again. Let's take the humble Writ of Summons. Certain pieces of information which are created on the document, may be used in many ways.