Over the years, a large body of molecular data has been rendered within Web pages using the popular Chime browser plugin. Unfortunately, the "plugin" concept has become rather frayed; some browsers have difficulty with Chime, others simply do not support it (particularly those on eg Linux and other new generation operating systems such as MacOS X). If you visit http://jmol.sourceforge.net/scripting.html however, you will note that another 3D molecule display program called JMol has come on by leaps and bounds, due particularly to the efforts of a number of recent enthusiastic contributors. Unlike Chime, JMol is <<opensource>> and hence not limited to the generosity of a single commercial company. In particular, the molecular scripting/style language which has become known as "Rasmol script" is increasingly well implemented in JMol, and many of the effects hitherto limited purely to Chime can now be replicated. It WILL require the Web page to be edited (the original design of the plugin syntax was not robust, and hence was very much plugin specific). One particularly exciting feature is that JMol is fully CML compliant, which means that all molecules can be carried in this format rather than older formats such as the Molfile (an illustration of the problems with the latter is that each atom line is defined by a line break character, which can vary or even break depending on the operating system). It should be possible therefore for any web page designed to use JMol to be FULLY XML compliant in all its data; e.g. XHTML for description and prose CML for molecular information SVG for 2D diagrams RSS for metadata. (only eg Rasmol script remains to be XML-ified!) -- Henry Rzepa. Imperial College, Chemistry Dept. +44 0778 626 8220 +44 020 7594 5804 (Fax) 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)