doctype inconsistency

According to the HTML 4.01 specification, the only legal options for the
DOCTYPE declaration contain a URI to a DTD at W3C.  However,
W3C's own documents do not contain this URI, e.g. on pages of the
specification such as 

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html

This seems to be an inconsistency, and not only that -- it seems to imply
that in the future, all web pages are going to have to link to a server at
W3C in order to be rendered properly???  

Please write something to clarify this inconsistency (if not error) in the
specification of version declarations.

Thanks,

Paul Arveson
Technology Architect
Office of Science
Dept. of Energy