Hi Stuart,

> A couple of quick questions:

I'd be glad to answer, but I suspect these really only have relevance *after* the main issue ("Is embedding HTML mark-up in MARC records a good/bad idea?") is decided.  ;-)

> (1) When you say "HTML" which version of HTML are you using?

For the HTML markup in the record, there's obviously no version explicitly specified.  Some <img> tags have an end tag (i.e. <img src="URL" />), so could be said to conform to XHTML 1.0, others have no end tag, so are generic HTML.  The ILS in question declared pages to be "HTML 4.0 Transitional" in older versions of the online catalog but HTML standards compliance was wishful thinking.  The current version declares pages to be "HTML 4.01 Transitional" and comes a lot closer to conforming.

This does bring up the issue, though, of the potential for a mis-match in conformation to a  declared DOCTYPE between the HTML mark-up in the record, and the online opac's HTML mark-up. 

> (2) What tool are you using to validate the HTML inside the MARC?

None that I am aware of.  (Note I'm not in the cataloging department, so am not familiar with all their workflow.)

> (3) Since HTML can use character encodings that MARC doesn't understand, how are you escaping the non-ASCII characters in the HTML?

I'm not sure what you are asking here.  I'm not aware of any HTML elements and/or attributes that contain non-ASCII characters.  Perhaps you are referring to data (or perhaps attribute values) rather than to the HTML mark-up code.  Our MARC records are encoded in Unicode UTF-8, so potentially any character can be represented.  For display of the data on the web, the online catalog is declaring that character set in a meta tag: <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">.

-- Michael

# Michael Doran, Systems Librarian
# University of Texas at Arlington
# 817-272-5326 office
# 817-688-1926 mobile
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________________________________________
From: Code for Libraries [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of stuart yeates [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Sunday, June 21, 2009 4:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] HTML mark-up in MARC records

Doran, Michael D wrote:
> Is anybody else embedding HTML mark-up code in MARC records [1]?  We're currently including an "<img>" tag in some MARC Holdings records in the 856z [2].   I'm inclined to think that HTML mark-up does not belong anywhere in MARC records, but am looking for other opinions (preferably with the reasoning behind the opinions), both pro and con.

A couple of quick questions:

(1) When you say "HTML" which version of HTML are you using?
(2) What tool are you using to validate the HTML inside the MARC?
(3) Since HTML can use character encodings that MARC doesn't understand,
how are you escaping the non-ASCII characters in the HTML?

cheers
stuart
--
Stuart Yeates
http://www.nzetc.org/       New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/     Institutional Repository