Glyn Moody has written an interesting and informative article about XML for the New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980530/xml.html which spotlights CML among other markup languages. It is factually correct (not always the case with XML articles :-( )and highlights the challenge of providing universal semantics and metadata. One of the concerns (Mark Pesce, VRML) is that XML could lead to 'Balkanisation' of the Web, through designers sticking to their own tags. I take the opposite view - there could hardly be anything much worse than the current syntactic and semantic chaos in chemical informatics. One area of particular interest is schemata for metadata. Ora Lassila (Nokia) notes that "it takes a long time to get enough representatives from any community to agree on anything" and "expects that rough and ready schemata will become standards by default simply because people will start using them". There are many quotes from supporters, ending with P.G.Bartlett (ArborText): "XML will provde to be one of the top ten technological innovations of the first century of computing". I'll buy that. P. chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)