100% - 80% = ?

[Thomas Dowling]

>Which web interfaces are you referring to?  OCLC's WebZ and SIRSI's
>WebCat, or another type of product? We're starting to educate ourselves on
>these here at UMCP, and I'd sure appreciate more information.

>Thanks in advance.
 
Propriety, and in one case a non-disclosure agreement,
requires that I not blab vendor names.  But if any of
you are testing or using web interfaces to your OPAC, research
databases, or anything else, I strongly recommend that you
get their interface running in one window, and a connection to 
WebLint in another (http://www.unipress.com/web-lint/).  View
source and paste the entire document into WebLint.  You're
likely to find quite a few things to bring to your vendor's
attention.

The point here is NOT to be an HTML purist for purism's sake.
The point is that the best guarantee of a document appearing
as intended on all browsers is compliance with some standard
level of tagging.  This is also the best guarantee for 
backwards compatibility under future browsers.  After all, 
how many home pages suddenly disappeared under Netscape 2.0,
just because those pages relied on Netscape 1.x's broken
manner of handling HTML comments?  (Lots, and they're not all
fixed yet.)

Thomas Dowling