It looks like a lot of work went into this. I think it's useful as an index telling readers where to find items in HR3200. Having gone through the bill, I know that reading an item and understanding it are not always the same, because many statements refer back to something else, like the IRS tax code. It's still very helpful for major items of interest.

One problem is that HR3200 will not be the final bill that Congress votes on, but many of its provisions will be similar enough for readers to gain a good understanding of what material the eventual proposal will cover.

erica...tell your friends good job!

A back of the book indexing style is a great idea.

Loads fairly fast...which is a plus for people like me with slow connections. I really like the clean look that isn't cluttered up with useless crap.

I was going to suggest an alphabet type locator at the top of the page but on second thought, I think the ordered tabs are better.

I like the gray box with the information bits. Sometimes all you need is a reminder when you're looking for something that you know you know but it's slipping out of your mind. Then the link to the subsection of an excerpt of the bill at the bottom of the gray box is handy if you need more info.

I can really see this as an excellent assist when looking for specific information contained in the bill.

Impressive.

WOW! What a great tool!

Greatly appreciate all the work, time and (I'm sure) energy went into this product. I know I will refer to it many times.

Will this option be available for the final bill that manages to survive the politicos?

Yes, I do think indexing i.e. Adminstrative then sub references, et al. would be helpful too.

But this is truly the best I've seen for accessing target areas of bill with ease.

Please keep us updated - and again, thanks!

Rec'd!

I think this is a really neat idea! Let me take a moment to share my experiences.

As a test, I tried zeroing in on a particular provision which is of interest to me: The personal mandate. To begin with, I looked under "mandate"; there was nothing there. I next tried looking under "responsibility", which is how I've seen the mandate provision described by some of its advocates in Congress. I did find it there, although by this point I was finding that switching pages on the site is somewhat slow (maybe it's being slashdotted right now, so to speak). It forwarded me to section 301, "Individual Responsibility". However, this is what it showed me when I clicked to see it:

For an individual’s responsibility to obtain acceptable coverage, see section 59B of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 (as added by section 401 of this Act).

Unfortunately, here I seemed to be blocked. There was no way to get to section 401 of the act, since there is no table of contents and no "next provision" button on the individual text pages.

Based on my couple of minutes of tooling here, I'd say this is a really neat site which could be even better with some adjustments. If you'd like some recommendations, here are some things to maybe change I can think of, in order of least to most difficulty:

1. You may want to add a "mandate: see responsibility, individual" item to the index in the Ms. I think that is a provision many people are curious about and they may know it better under the other name.

2. A table of contents option would be great, for situations where you know you want "section 401" but don't know how to look that up in the index.

3. It would be nice if there were some way to link from the little tiny section pages directly into a part of the bill. The way I'd normally look at legislation like this is to just open a PDF and "Find" over and over again for whatever string I'm looking at. This is less convenient than your index, but it does mean that once I've found what I'm looking for I can see it in its original context. Could it maybe be possible to integrate the site with Scribd somehow, or at least link directly to the bill text (the section pages say only "original available on thomas.gov"... I seem to remember at least at one time thomas was kind of difficult to link into, but you might have more luck with govtrack.us).

4. What to me would be really neat is if the site also contained similar indices for the Senate (HELP and Finance) bills! This would be REALLY useful, and present a feature that just ctrl-f-ing PDFs can't as it would allow one to essentially compare side by side comparable provisions from each of the three bills.

5. It seems like you've got a nice infrastructure here, but what would be ultimately most useful is if this had some sort of "wiki" feature so users could make or suggest changes-- say for example that I as a random user had stumbled in, looked for "mandate", not found it, then realized it was under "individual responsibility". If there were some way to make or recommend changes to the site, I could have just gone and added the "mandate" item myself. Retrofitting something like this might be intractably difficult if it wasn't planned for to begin with, but it would make a lot of things easier (for example, you could crowdsource adding the HELP and Finance bills) and would actually mean you could even open up the site to covering other bills in future.

6. It does seem surprising that the "top level" index pages are going so slow. Are they actually being generated dynamically? Maybe you should look into mod_cache, or enabling your web architecture's caching system for at least those top level pages.

Anyway good luck with this.