On Fri, 6 Dec 1996, Joel Crisp wrote: [...]
One of the advantages of style sheets is that they *cascade*. Theoretically, this means that you as the viewer can override any (within certain limits) specification from the author with your own. So, if they provide a poor stylesheet, you can override some or all of it from your own.
This should actually *improve* matters Check out http://www.w3.org/ for the latest information
I am a great supporter of style sheets and the work that W3 is doing. There is a language standard (DSSSL) but it's non trivial to implement so most people will aim for something much simpler. At present AFAIK only text is being considered in style sheets (i.e. how to format and arrange various parts of a document). This is difficult enough. However *we* really have to consider chemical style sheets as well since the way that something is presented affects the way that people like to transport it. So, for example, (using SMILES notation) are the following simply differences in style?: c1ccccc1 C1=CC=CC=C1 (If you don't know SMILES, these are 'aromatic' and 'Kekule' benzene 'structures'). If you are sent the bottom one, what do you want to happen: - leave it precisely as it is because the author wanted to emphasise this on a treatise on valence-bond theory - automatically convert it to the top one (I think the Daylight software does this). - keep them, but also run a method which allows the one to fulfil a search for the other. It gets worse with more complex systems where conventional valence bonds don't work easily (e.g. metal pi-bonding). This will take a long time to solve. However, until we do this, we are still partially linked to the 'gif-only' method of presenting chemical structures. My own iterim solution for CML is that I hold precisely what I am sent but help the user to add whatever software they require for chemical perception, rendering, etc. Another area which I have been trying to tackle is how to display spectra. It's 'obvious' that NMR spectra (and some IR) have the big numbers at the left of the picture, but how do you tell generic software to do that - author, program, user? I fully agree about the value of cascading. I see the following places at which style can be introduced *where the primary purpose of the document is to transfer content*: - as 'hints' in the authoring (e.g. for a spectral object there is a DISPLAY attribute which is not data but gives hints : <... DISPLAY="XREVERSE"... > 1.234 ...</> - as part of the chemical intelligence of the generic chemical browser. e.g. whenever it encounters a molecule with 3D or 2D coordinates it offers the possibility of graphical rendering. (Coordinates have other uses than just drawing pictures :-) - as user options which can be selected in the browser OR as additional user supplied tools (e.g. plug-ins or pluglets). - rendering from a 3rd party application outside the author's or user's control. In the best of all possible worlds these applications would have a compatible stylesheet policy :-) I imagine that this os something that concerns publishing houses as they already have their own house styles for benzene, spectra... So long as they only expect humans to read their output they will probably just translate their current approaches, but if they want machines to read the publications - and they should :-) - the style will need defining precisely. P. Peter Murray-Rust (PeterMR, ) Director, Virtual School of Molecular Sciences Pharmaceutical Sciences, Nottingham University, NG7 2RD, UK; Tel 44-115-9515100 Fax 5110 http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms/; OMF: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/omf/ ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)