Because the elections are coming, I tried to understand what laws were introduced and what changes were made to the laws since the last election. I visited sso.agc.gov.sg and they have this timeline box on each page and you have to select a date to see a version of the statute. There was no way to compare different versions on the same screen.

Today, I created a git repository to track all changes to the statutes.

Git is a version control system that records changes to a set of files over time. Combined with markdown, it becomes simple to see all changes made to a statute.

Behind the scenes, the documents on sso.agc are word-converted pages. That means you would have a table in a table in a table to display a line of text. There were too many small differences in the statute documents to cover every edge case so some of mine have unformatted text as a fallback.

An interesting feature is that the commits are also commited on the same day that the statute changes, together with the differences in text. This can be viewed below.

This is a small step in my goal to create a powerful legal application on desktop. Please drop me an email if you’re a law student or lawyer. I want to solve your problems.

– 2020-06-20