Some of the high (low?) points of the ACS meeting that I encountered. a) Three new "you only need to visit this site for all your chemical needs" sites announced; http://chemweb.com http://sciquest.com http://www.ChemCenter.org The quality and focus varies enormously (but I will leave you to decide which is what yourselves). b) A new chemistry viewer called WebLab from MSI is launched, initially as a stand-alone application, but within three weeks as a Netscape plug-in. Its focus is on representation of "materials", ie unit cells, polymers, etc, although it can also handle e.g. pdb files etc. The plug-in will be free, as is Chime. It has features that Chime does not have (and vice versa). Anyone want to produce a Molecule-of-the-Month display using WebLab ? c) Java is BIG! But there are concerns about its security (perhaps misfounded?) and its slow performance (even with just-in-time compilation). People are waiting for Java3D, but to quote "Java is not ready today, tomorrow will be too late". VRML by the way was very little discussed, except by SGI! d) At the presentations about the Web, almost all were by commercial developers. Few "academics" produced memorable presentations (I reserve comment about my own, which you can see on http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/talks/intranets/ ) When I asked in one such presentation as to who was going to control standards in the chemical Internet, the reply was almost always evasive to the extreme. Chemical MIME by the way is being widely adopted, although the situation with Java classes is less clear!! P.S. Don't tell the gang at work, but I'm skipping the next two days of lectures to hang out with Goofy at DisneyWorld. ----- 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)