- chemweb - imperial.ac.uk

Re: Web Browsers for chemistry
by Stephen Le Hunte 15 May '96

15 May '96

> which seems to support some things that chemists might want to > see. Perhaps the most important is support for style sheets > and greek. > I wonder what the scope will be for the chemical community creating such > style sheets! > Netscape supporting style sheets in late '96. I guess they had to announce it soon (couldn't be seen to being beaten off the mark by Microsoft) The public beta of Internet Explorer 3 (due this month) will support style sheets (according to the W3C style sheets spec - check http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/ for technical reports on style sheets, frame layout using style sheets (also to be supported by IEx 3) and some technical reports about tables as well) and DocObject objects as well (such as Word documents will be) as part of Microsoft's unified 'web browsing' model of integrating the web into the home system. As far as I know, only GNNPress (A combined editor/browser for Windows) supports style sheets at present, but once the big boys do it, everyone will, which can only be a good thing. Of course, then we have the font war. Netscape teaming up with Adobe to provide a solution and Microsoft going it alone. The style sheet mechanisms are definitely worth a look if you haven't already, (see above for W3C technical reports URL's). As for chemists creating style sheets - we'll still be at the relative disadvantage of not being an economically viable market for the likes of Microsoft/Netscape, or anybody on the W3C and so will get style sheet possibilities identical to everyone else. (i.e. for text presentation) Unless someone out there is willing to write a browser. Cheers Steve -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen Le Hunte (cmlehunt(a)swan.ac.uk) Author of the HTML Reference Library, currently at v2.2 ftp://ftp.swan.ac.uk/pub/in.coming/htmlib/ http://hjs.geol.uib.no/html/htmlibrd/htmlibrd.htm - The HTMLibrd a WWW discussion forum about the HTMLib ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver(a)ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa(a)ic.ac.uk)

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Re: Automatically redirecting a Web site
by Stephen Le Hunte 14 May '96

14 May '96

> <meta http-equiv = "Refresh" content = "4; url=the new url"> > This (known as Client Pull) was introduced by Netscape (when they first started supporting Server Push as well), but is also supported by the Internet Explorer (definitely Win95 versions, I presume Mac/Win3.x versions also) and NCSA Mosaic (same as above, definitely Win95). It is very probably supported by almost all browsers I should imagine, since it just creates artificial HTTP response headers to the browser. Cheers Steve -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen Le Hunte (cmlehunt(a)swan.ac.uk) Author of the HTML Reference Library, currently at v2.2 ftp://ftp.swan.ac.uk/pub/in.coming/htmlib/ http://hjs.geol.uib.no/html/htmlibrd/htmlibrd.htm - The HTMLibrd a WWW discussion forum about the HTMLib ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver(a)ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa(a)ic.ac.uk)

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Automatically redirecting a Web site
by Rzepa, Henry 14 May '96

14 May '96

The following command was new to me at least. It means that if you do move a Web directory or site to another, you can automate the process for the user; Put this into the header of any document that might have moved <meta http-equiv = "Refresh" content = "4; url=the new url"> Not supported by all browsers, but certainly Netscape does. Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY; rzepa(a)ic.ac.uk; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804. URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ (Eudora Pro 3.0) ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver(a)ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa(a)ic.ac.uk)

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Web Browsers for chemistry
by Rzepa, Henry 13 May '96

13 May '96

As a community, we have often lacked the clout to persuade browser developers to put features important to us in (vis superscripts only recently acquired, greek still missing). Hence this link to Netscape 4 (sic) http://192.216.48.63/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?96058.navigator4.htm (although it is not due to come until late 1996) which seems to support some things that chemists might want to see. Perhaps the most important is support for style sheets and greek. I wonder what the scope will be for the chemical community creating such style sheets! Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY; rzepa(a)ic.ac.uk; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804. URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ (Eudora Pro 3.0) ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver(a)ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa(a)ic.ac.uk)

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Beilstein Discussion List
by D.Parkin＠dl.ac.uk 13 May '96

13 May '96

We have set up a discussion list on mailbase to to discuss the Beilstein/CrossFire trial for the UK academic community currently being hosted by CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory. The purpose of the list is to exchange views on the System and hopefully act as a channel of communication between the chemistry community, CHEST (who hopefully may organise a subscription deal for Beilstein/CrossFire), Librarians, and those who hold the purse strings within the HEIs. The data from the Gmelin Handbook has recently become available via the Crossfire which expands the property information to include inorganic and organometallic compounds. Gmelin data is not available in the current trial, but members of this group may wish to make their opinions known about inclusion of such data in any a possible future CHEST deal. I encourage you all to get involved in the discussion process - otherwise the UK chemistry community may end up not getting what it wants and possibly may end up getting nothing at all. To subscribe to the Beilstein/CrossFire discussion list send a message to mailbase(a)mailbase.ac.uk with the text: join chest-crossfire your name stop as the sole content of you message. (Substitute you own name for your name of course!!). Regards Bob McMeeking ============================================================== Dr R.F. McMeeking CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory Warrington WA4 4AD Tel: +44 (0)1925 603162 Fax: +44 (0)1925 603100 E-mail r.f.mcmeeking(a)dl.ac.uk ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver(a)ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa(a)ic.ac.uk)

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(Fwd) (fwd)
by Dr Alan Mills 11 May '96

11 May '96

=========== those chemists on this list with an interest in bio-molecules, proteins, and sequences, etc, may wish to know about this news. Alan Mills at Venus Internet Ltd, 24 Denmark Street, London WC2H 8NJ, UK email:alan@venus.co.uk web:http://www.venus.co.uk Tel: +44 (0)171 240 5858 Fax: +44 (0)171 240 5859 Providing Web and Internet services and solutions ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 10 May 1996 17:03:11 -0400 From: John McCarthy <mccarthy(a)dinosaur.pdb.bnl.gov> To: Multiple recipients of list <pdb-l(a)pdb.pdb.bnl.gov> Subject: (Fwd) SWISS-PROT SHOULD HAVE BEEN 10 YEARS OLD IN JULY 1996, BUT IT MAY DISAPPEAR ON JUNE 30, 1996. Due to funding problems, SWISS-PROT as well as PROSITE, and the ENZYME nomenclature databases will disappear on June 30, 1996 if no solution is found before that date. The ExPASy WWW server and all services associated with it will also shut down. The distribution of the SWISS- 2DPAGE database will also be discontinued. Other external databases, WWW services and software packages that depend on SWISS-PROT, PROSITE and ENZYME as well as on the links provided between biomolecular databases will also be severely affected by this problem. Users of services and databases such as ENTREZ, BLOCKS, SRS, Owl, etc. should also be aware that most annotations at the protein level available through these services originate from SWISS-PROT or PROSITE. While the databases listed above as well as the ExPASy server are used in almost every laboratory doing molecular biology in the world, the funding for these projects has always been very modest (to say the least) and is now, due to procedural problems, going to disappear. [If you are not interested in the details of these problems and you want to send us a email or letter (fax) of support explaining why you think that these resources should stay available to the biological user community, you can skip the following section and jump to the end of this message] SUMMARY OF THE CURRENT SITUATION AND WHAT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED Currently SWISS-PROT is developed as a collaboration between two sites: - The Medical Biochemistry Department of the University of Geneva, where in addition to the principal investigator of the project (Amos Bairoch), five annotators and a programmer are working on SWISS-PROT and related projects. Three of the five annotators are paid by a Swiss National Fund (FNRS) grant that ends on June 30. One additional annotator position, which is paid for by a special EMBL grant which also ends at the same time. The last position is on a Glaxo academic grant which will end in December. - The EMBL outstation, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, where six persons are working on SWISS-PROT: a coordinator (Rolf Apweiler), four annotators and a programmer. The EBI has recently embarked on major work to complement SWISS-PROT with a computer annotated supplement called TrEMBL which together with SWISS-PROT produces the first really non-redundant annotated protein sequence database. The completion of this work will require expanded resources at the EBI. About two years ago, a decision was reached in Switzerland that due to the international nature of the SWISS-PROT database, it ought not be funded by money reserved for national projects, but rather from funds intended for projects at the European or International level and to which Switzerland participates. Therefore we were asked to write a grant proposal at the European level. As such a proposal requires participants from at least two or more EU states (which Switzerland is not), an application was submitted in December 1995 which requests: - Five positions in Geneva for the annotators whose contracts will otherwise end in June 1996. - Four positions at EBI, to allow the development of TrEMBL and to cope with the increasing flow of data from genomic projects. - One position in Ireland, with Prof. Keith Tipton, to maintain and update the enzyme nomenclature (EC number) of the International Union of Biology and Molecular Biology (IUBMB). This nomenclature is the backbone of the ENZYME database. - One position at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and a partial position at the company Compugen to develop, in collaboration, the Bioccelerator sequence search hardware engine in ways that will help the maintenance of TrEMBL. - One position at INRIA in France, to develop software in collaboration with Compugen. We have been advised that this proposal was evaluated favorably by the scientific experts of the EU (equivalent of an US Study Section), but was not accepted at a higher level. The main (and apparently only) reason seems to be that those judging the proposal were under the impression that it requested funds solely for new developments. They were unaware that the CURRENT ACTIVITIES could not be maintained without this funding. They also seem to have failed to take note of the fact that the money for the Swiss operation was not coming out of the EU budget, but directly from Swiss government funds, provided that the EU approved the project. They therefore rejected this project while accepting other projects which themselves depend on the existence of SWISS-PROT (for example, a project in which Geneva is also involved, to establish a G-protein linked receptor database which will extend SWISS-PROT to provide information specific to this field of research). Having learned the extent of the problem, the EU seems genuinely concerned but does not seem to have the means of reversing such a decision. They are asking us to resubmit the proposal. But such a process will take almost a year and we only have two months left of salaries.... In Switzerland, money for SWISS-PROT is available, but can not be assigned to such a purpose before the EU accepts the grant. So we are in a catch 22 situation where everyone agrees that there is a problem, that it should be solved, but that they are unable to do anything for procedural reasons ! WHAT CAN WE AND YOU DO ? In the absence of public funding two scenarios seem possible. SWISS-PROT and PROSITE could pass into private hands as proprietary databases, or some non-profit association could be established which would recoup the ENTIRE costs of the operation through subscriptions. Two pharmaceutical companies have already expressed interest in the former solution, and existing examples of the latter are CAS (Chemical abstracts) and CCDC (Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre). However we see enormous benefits to the user community from the public availability of the data. The first of these solutions would be incompatible with the mission of our partners at the EBI, but if it comes between a complete disappearance and such a solution, there does not seem to be a choice. At the time when there is growing concern about the privatisation of genomic data, we are facing a situation that could lead to the disappearance of what we think are the most widely used information resources on protein sequences because of our reliance on soft public money. We would much prefer to continue to offer and extend services to all the biological user community free of charge. To do so we need your help to convince the various funding agencies that you need these services for your research. We are therefore asking our user community to send emails of support stating why you think that these resources should continue to be available. You can send these messages to: help.sprot(a)hon.ch Do not forget to include in such an email, your full name, title and organization to which you belong. If you wish to write a letter of support, you can fax it to the following number: + 41-22-346 87 58 Or send it by post to: Amos Bairoch Dept. Medical Biochemistry 1, rue Michel Servet 1211 Geneva 4 Switzerland Many thanks to all of you. Amos Bairoch PS1: Feel free to forward this message to colleagues. PS2: Apologies to all those of you who have (will) receive multiple copies of this message. PS3: This text is also available on WWW at: http://expasy.hcuge.ch/sprot/help-sprot.html ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver(a)ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa(a)ic.ac.uk)

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Moving GIFs (on PCs)
by Jeffrey J Gosper 08 May '96

08 May '96

Dear interested parties, a short while ago Henry pointed out that a Mac product is avilable for the generation of 'moving Gifs' that can be animated under Netscape 2. The bookware/shareware program 'GIF Construction Set' is a Windows programs that also enables the generation of such files. I have used this software in conjunction with my program Re_View (soon to be provided free to all individuals via the WWW and a special SoftShell deal - see URL below for further details on Re_View) to create a couple of interesting (in my opinion) pages, please see: http://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/chem/ch241s/re_view/addconf.htm http://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/chem/ch241s/re_view/addreact.htm Comments on these pages particularly regarding download times, animation speed, etc are welcome. Also if detailed information on how these GIFs were generated is wanted I could write a short WWW page on this topic. /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ Dr. Jeff Gosper Dept. of Chemistry BRUNEL University Uxbridge Middx UB8 3PH, UK voice: 01895 274000 x2187 facsim: 01895 256844 internet/email/work: Jeffrey.Gosper(a)brunel.ac.uk internet/WWW: http://http1.brunel.ac.uk:8080/~castjjg Re_View's Home page (A molecular display/animation/analysis program): http://http1.brunel.ac.uk:8080/depts/chem/ch241s/re_view/re_view.htm \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver(a)ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa(a)ic.ac.uk)

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HTML 3.2
by M.Winter＠Sheffield.ac.uk 08 May '96

08 May '96

Colleagues may be interested to see http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/MarkUp.html which has pointers to HTML 3.2 information (7th May 1996) Dr Mark J Winter (Deputy Head of Department, Director of Studies) Department of Chemistry, The University, Sheffield S3 7HF, England tel: +44 (0)114 282 4498 fax: +44 (0)114 273 8673 e-m: M.Winter(a)Sheffield.ac.uk web: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~chem/staff/mjw/mark-winter.html CU-SeeMe: mac043078.shef.ac.uk ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver(a)ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa(a)ic.ac.uk)

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Molecules of the Month
by Rzepa, Henry 30 Apr '96

30 Apr '96

Following Karl Harrison's impressive display of Ferrocene, I would also like to note a recent addition of ours; http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/motm/dna.html where use is made of "CSML" to highlight various regions of the molecule, in conjunction with Chime. (The technology is not quite there yet, since we use an image map on a 2D NMR spectrum to highight peaks, and this cannot yet resolve directly to a CSML entry, which must be accessed via a <ambed> tag, and not a <A HREF> tag, which is the only sort that the local image map can point to. Has anyone figured out a way of making Javascript do this? Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY; rzepa(a)ic.ac.uk; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804. URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ (Eudora Pro 3.0) ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver(a)ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa(a)ic.ac.uk)

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MOTM
by Paul May 30 Apr '96

30 Apr '96

Hi, The May MOTM is now ready for your inspection. It is ferrocene, and was provided by Karl Harrison from Oxford. The direct URL is: http://www.ncl.ox.ac.uk/mom/ferrocene/ferrocene.html and it can also be found from the usual MOTM site at: http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Chemistry/MOTM/motm.htm ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Paul May, School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, UK tel: +44 (0)117 9287667, fax: +44 (0)117 9251295 email: paul.may(a)bris.ac.uk WWW: http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Chemistry/staff/pwm.htm "Another squashed hedgehog in the gutter of the information superhighway" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver(a)ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa(a)ic.ac.uk)

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