October 2004 - chemweb - imperial.ac.uk

Dear to chemists hearts: Greek characters on the Web
by Rzepa, Henry 01 Nov '04

01 Nov '04

I am posting this because I see "FAQs" on this topic widely, and I dont know many of the answers myself! Its the issue of greek characters, much used in chemistry! Over the last 10 years, it seems many mechanisms have been used to display them in browsers. Many of these mechanisms had short lifetimes! The current recommended way, if using the standard (7-bit) ASCII text character set, is to define an entity. thus β or Β (its case sensitive). Older deprecated methods ( <font face="symbol">b</font> ), along with CSS equivalents, by and large no longer work. The "future way" is to use utf encoding. Here is where confusion can start. Thus http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/greek.html contains (according to my unicode compliant text editor, bbedit 8) a utf-8 encoded beta. One has to tell the browser that the default encoding is indeed Unicode utf-8, but in my hands at least, this does not result in display of a beta. Is there anyone out there who can explain it all to us? -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax); rzepahs(a)mac.com (iChat) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK. (Voracious anti-spam filter in operation for received email. If expected reply not received, please phone/fax).

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Re: [chemweb] Dear to chemists hearts: Greek characters on the Web
by Rzepa, Henry 31 Oct '04

31 Oct '04

>Hi, > >I don't know if that is going to be helpful but... >* By default I see an I with a caret and a square for the first symbol >* If I save your file in local and I open it, I see betas for both characters >* Your file seems to be served as encoded in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) according to the page info information in Mozilla > >It looks like that the web server may override your file encoding... >http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/tutorial-char-enc/#declaring >http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-htaccess-charset You correct Jordi. But see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Sep/0176.html which says that the server should really NOT do this! At any rate, I have switched a setting off on the server #AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1 and now http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/greek.html does indeed show a beta for the utf-encoded version. I strongly suspect however server behaviour will differ wildly. Apache (2.0.49 for above) can be configured, but my experience in asking server administrators to do these things can be very uncertain. I would hazard a guess that dealing with eg greek characters is likely to be a problem for the foreseeable future. -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax); rzepahs(a)mac.com (iChat) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK. (Voracious anti-spam filter in operation for received email. If expected reply not received, please phone/fax).

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Semantic Web in Life Sciences
by Rzepa, Henry 28 Oct '04

28 Oct '04

Of considerable interest is the conference, occurring as I write this email, in Boston, under the auspices of the World-Wide Web consortium, on the topic of the "semantic Web in Life sciences", with particular emphasis on the so called LSID (Life sciences identifier). With some 4 billion documents and many types of object now described on the Web, uniquely indentifying these is an urgent priority. I offer to this form two "position papers" submitted to the above dealing more specifically with chemistry; http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swls-ws/2004Sep/ and particularly http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swls-ws/2004Sep/att-0025/molsem.… and http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swls-ws/2004Sep/att-0026/inchi.h… The latter in particular deals with the topic of chemical identifiers, namely the INChI project. If you dont know about this project, I urge you to go find out! A futher announcement regarding this conference will be made shortly. -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax); rzepahs(a)mac.com (iChat) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK. (Voracious anti-spam filter in operation for received email. If expected reply not received, please phone/fax).

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Invitation to submit an abstract: Automation and Remote Access Technology in the Undergraduate Teaching Laboratory
by Bob Hanson 07 Oct '04

07 Oct '04

Call for abstracts: Division of Chemical Education Symposium: Automation and Remote Access Technology in the Undergraduate Teaching Laboratory. ACS 229th National Meeting, San Diego, March 13–17, 2005 http://www.chemistry.org/portal/a/c/s/1/acsdisplay.html?DOC=meetings\sandie… Deadline for abstract submission: Nov. 15, 2005 http://oasys.acs.org/acs/229nm/ched/papers/index.cgi Title: Automation and Remote Access Technology in the Undergraduate Teaching Laboratory Type: Oral Abstract: One of the interesting aspects of automation is how students and faculty react to it (sometimes quite differently). Does automation "spoil" the experiment, or does it enhance the learning experience? Does remote access unnecessarily isolate the student from "really understanding" what is going on, or does it bring the teaching laboratory into the 21st century? This symposium will focus on the use of laboratory automation and remote access technologies that enable student access to state-of-the-art techniques at any level in the undergraduate or high school curriculum, either at a single institution or via distant "collaboratory" experiences. Presentations related to experimental design, implementation, adaptability, security, safety, and assessment of impact on student learning are welcome. Please forward this announcement to colleagues you think might be interested. If you or someone you know might be interested in presenting at this symposium, please do contact me. Bob Hanson -- Robert M. Hanson, hansonr(a)stolaf.edu, 507-646-3107 Professor of Chemistry, St. Olaf College 1520 St. Olaf Ave., Northfield, MN 55057 mailto:hansonr@stolaf.edu http://www.stolaf.edu/people/hansonr

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Molecule of the Month - October
by Paul May 01 Oct '04

01 Oct '04

Hi, October's MOTM is butane, the fuel in portable cookers. It has been written by Feng Wang from Swinburn University in Melbourne, Australia. http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/motm.htm#oct2004 Regards, ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Paul May, School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, UK tel: +44 (0)117 928-9927 fax: +44 (0)117 925-1295 <mailto:paul.may@bris.ac.uk> Mobile: 07811371539 Home URL: <http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/staff/pwm.htm> Molecule of the Month: <http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/motm.htm> "Ah, a chemist, eh? Do we get to blow something up, then?" League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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