FW: [WEB4LIB] DOCTYPE declaration for invalid page

[Gimon, Charles A]

> 
> What is the advice from any standards gurus out there for 
> pages that cannot
> be validated. Should they include a DOCTYPE declaration or not?
> 

Well, if you go through the validator, they'll pick a standard to validate
you against anyway if you don't specify one...

> In particular a number of my pages cannot be validated due to the HTML
> standard for *not* using an ampersand in a URI, and instead 
> using "&".
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.2.2
> 
> A curious library problem with this part of the standard is in the 856
> field of a catalog record. If one still has telnet access to 
> the catalog it
> seems that the URI must not follow the HTML standard or else 
> an incorrect
> address will be displayed in the telnet version.
> 

You could conceivably store the URL without the entity in the catalog, then
include code in your website that will entify ampersands, etc. in the HTML
output after querying the catalog. Problem with that is that most catalog
vendors don't support that kind of scripting in their web products (I know
Innopac doesn't).

What you really need is to: 

--store it with a &
--display it to telnet users with a &
--display it to web users with a &

Maybe bring it up with your catalog vendor...? You might be stuck with
Hobson's choice otherwise.

--Charles Gimon
  Minneapolis Public Library