On Jun 22, 2009, at 5:53 PM, Cloutman, David wrote:
From the perspective of a programmer, rather than a cataloguer, my
opinion is firmly no, HTML does not belong in your MARC records.
In application development, general best practice is to separate
information systems into layers, splitting data from "business
logic" and "presentation logic". MARC stores data, and HTML belongs
to presentation. Though it may sound like a good idea today to put
HTML into a MARC record, that tag may be meaningless down the road
when some other technology is used to present your record data. If
you wish to present data in HTML, you are much better off leaving
the HTML out of your MARC, and allowing the application to generate
tags.
I whole-heartedly concur, and I could not hardly have said it any
better than David. Adding mark-up to a data structure like that only
confuses the issue and is asking for trouble down the road.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
