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