XHTML and Archiving

Greetings! I'm a professonal archivist who is trying to develop
recommendations I can provide to page developers at our university and
elsewhere to improve long term viability of their documents. I have
until recently been suggesting to developers that W3c validation process
was a way of conforming their work to some sort of standard that might
improve the prospects for interoperability and sustainability. I was
intrigued by the three flavors options presented in html 4.0 thinking
that perhaps one of the flavors might be a special set of tags labelled
"archival".

It would seem that the most robust of the options would be "Strict", but
that doesn't accomodate graphic elements that could be an integral part
of the "record" that must be preserved. (yes we have html applications
on our campus for multimedia-born documents that are legally public
records) Has W3C considered this and do they make a recommendation for
the flavor appropriate for archival retention?

Received on Tuesday, 18 May 1999 05:33:51 UTC