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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