Standards for Web Page Submission

[Tim Smith]

I found last week's discussion on "What's next after HTML?" to be very
interesting and thought-provoking. This posting reflects one of the thoughts
it provoked in me.

I'm the main web manager in an academic library and I'm gradually trying to
evolve our pages to better compliance with accepted standards--XHTML would
be my preference--but we're a long way from getting there. In my library
there are a number of other staff members who submit pages to me for
inclusion on our site, and sometimes these pages have abysmally bad HTML. In
the most recent instance, the librarian in question had hired a student to
do a series of finding lists in her subject area and what this student did
was absolute and utter crap. He had done more than 40 pages before giving me
any of them. I had to have MY student assistant clean them up, something she
shouldn't have had to do, IMHO. In another instance, a huge set of pages for
one library department have been done over the years by students with widely
varying levels of expertise, and no one has had the time or inclination to
deal with them.

My question is this: how many of you have written policies stating what
condition pages must be in before they are submitted to you? And, more
importantly, what kinds of things to you state in those policies? (I can
think of one thing I'd say: pages from FrontPage or Word are not
acceptable.) As far as I'm concerned, I'd really not spend much of my time
cleaning up other people's messes--cleaning up my own is time-consuming
enough--but I'd love to hear how other Web4Libbers handle this kind of
situation.

Looking forward to your responses,

Tim Smith

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    Tim Smith                    Phone: (740) 593-2634
    Reference Dept.              E-Mail: tsmith1 at ohiou.edu
    Alden Library, Ohio Univ.    Fax: (740) 593-0138
    Athens, OH 45701

    "Technology has replaced reflection" -- Utah Phillips
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