The Social Security Administration prepared this World Wide Web (WWW) version of the Compilation of Social Security Laws from the same files used to create the printed version. We have attempted to make this Web version usable by the largest possible audience. The HTML version should be identical in content with the printed version. There are, however, a number of modifications in format, due to the differing requirements of the Web.
Hierarchical Organization: You can navigate through the Compilation using the hypertext links which are embedded in the tables of contents. From the Compilation title page, follow the link called "Table of Contents" for the master table of contents for all Titles. Each link in the master table of contents leads to the table of contents for the corresponding Title; the tables of contents for the Titles and the Internal Revenue Code provisions lead to the text of the sections. Each Title table of contents also contains links to the next and previous Titles and back to the master table of contents. Each of the individual sections contains links to the next and previous sections in that Title and back to the Title table of contents. Thus, by following the appropriate hypertext links, you can navigate up, down, and across every level of the hierarchy.
Pagination: Since the concept of page numbers has little meaning on the Web, and since it would not be feasible in any case to reproduce the pagination of the printed version, we have split the Compilation into sections, making each section a separate Web document. This has the advantage of making it easy to navigate from the table of contents of each Title to the individual sections. The disadvantage is that some documents are quite large, while others are very small.
Footnotes: Instead of gathering footnotes at the end of each page, we have put them at the end of each section. Since HTML does not have a footnote facility as such, we have made the footnote references into internal hypertext links to the actual text of the footnotes. Each footnote contains a link back to the footnote reference. Thus, you may jump from the footnote reference directly to the footnote in the same HTML file, then follow the link from the text of the footnote back to the reference. The footnotes are numbered sequentially through a Title, as in the printed version of the Compilation, and the footnote numbers in the HTML version should match those of the printed version.
Cross-References: The Compilation contains a number of references to other parts of the Social Security Act, to various Public Laws, and to the United States Code. We have attempted to convert cross-references to the Act into hypertext links to the relevant sections, subsections, and paragraphs. By following these links, you can jump directly to the referenced portions of the Act. The normal hierarchy below the section level is to subsections (designated by lower-case letters), paragraphs (numbers), sub-paragraphs (upper-case letters), clauses (lower-case Roman numerals), and subdivisions (upper-case Roman numerals). We have only attempted to link cross-references down to the third (sub-paragraph) level. Thus, for example, a hypertext link at a reference to section 202(j)(5)(B) will lead directly to the top of that sub-paragraph, but a link at a reference to 1886(b)(3)(B)(i)(IV) will lead to the top of the sub-paragraph, section 1886(b)(3)(B).
Because of the great variety of ways in which the Social Security Act refers to sections of the Act and to other laws, the conversion program was not always able to identify cross-references properly and to distinguish them from references to other documents. Thus, a small percentage of cross-reference links will be invalid. We hope that the resulting product is nevertheless accurate enough to be useful.
Index: References in the Index were converted to hypertext links to the corresponding sections. As with cross-references, we tagged these links only to the third subsection (i.e., sub-paragraph) level.
Preparation: The files used to prepare both the printed and HTML version of the Compilation contain the text of the Act prepared using the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). At SSA's request, the U.S. Government Printing Office developed an SGML Document Type Definition (DTD) describing the structure of the Compilation, converted the previously existing electronic files into SGML, and provided its Microcomp typesetting program to prepare the printed version. SSA then updated files with the provisions passed through January 1, 2003, and developed a program to convert them to the Hypertext Markup Language for the World Wide Web version.