No argument here. Perhaps I misunderstood your previous message as it
was related to Mark's message about OAI-PMH etc.
--Ere
Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
But here's my point.
There is no way for a consumer of MARC records to know if the MARC
records contain HTML or not. If a downstream consumer wants to display
MARC in an html environment, the consumer can either assume they contain
html, and then end up displaying MARC _wrong_ if it has has html special
chars like < or > but does not have html. Or it can assume it does
_not_have HTML, and end up displaying escaped html tags to the user if
it really DOES have html. This really applies no matter what
presentation format the downstream consumer wants to display in. Plain
text? Assume it is html, and strip out html tags, potentially
accidentally stripping out actual information if it wasn't html but
contained html special chars. Or assume it's not html and just plain
text, and just display it, and show the user html tags.
There's no way for a downstream consumer of MARC records to know if data
is in html or just plain text. In general, I think this is becuase the
assumption is it's always just plain text. If you start putting html in
there, there's no way for a downstream consumer to predict whether it's
going to be html or not, because that's not part of the MARC standard to
advertise that, so there's no way for a downstream consumer to reliably
display it correctly. You've put html in counting on your current local
system being specifically configured to expect html in certain MARC
fields. Fine. But as soon as you start distributing that MARC to
downstream consumers, you've made things awfully confusing and
unpredictable.
Jonathan
