A rant (please excuse). I do so because for the first 8 years or so of the (Chemical) Web, most of my colleagues largely ignored it for teaching. In the last two, most now have some sort of presence on our teaching site. But I cannot remember the last occasion when HTML has been offered. Its all Acrobat now, bloody great big globs of it. Typically between 1 - 5 Mbyte (although the record is 18 Mbytes thus far). The contents are linear, ie depart not all all from the serial fashion of yesteryear, and contain no "interactivity" whatsoever (let alone semantic markup), or simple navigation aids such as a ToC. So I expect most students rail about the cost of printing our lecture notes nowadays! We have of course largely stopped photocopying them for students now that they are "available on the web". None of it streams either (whatever happened to streaming Acrobat?), so the students can forget viewing it unless they use broadband on their computer. In 2nd place is raw Powerpoint. HTML, like eg Apple computers, has possibly 2% of the market! Lets hope Adobe don't go out of business! By the way, talking about libraries, I have heard that Acrobat downloaded from Journals may be subject to surprising restrictions. Thus some journals may require all local copies to be deleted if at any time the institutional subscription is cancelled. Most journals only allow "personal use", which means eg passing a reprint on to a student is disallowed. As for "scraping" say an entire themed issue of a journal, that has resulted in the <<entire institute>> being barred from using the journal (at least for a period; the explanation was that one naughty user called "Web Cache" was responsible, according to the publisher). -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax); rzepahs@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).