On Sun, 25 Jan 1998, Rzepa, Henry wrote:
There is great interest in Microsoft and its policy with Internet Explorer, and some interesting comments from Michael Toy of Netscape about "We are working hard to figure out not only how we make the source available, but to also really get out of the way of a net-community based effort to make great client-side software". This has been interpreted by some as saying that Netscape will release the source code for V 5 of their browser, and then hand over further development to the community.
The press release is at: http://www.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html?cp=nws01flh1
Or maybe the future is with XML custom solutions, of which CML (chemistry markup language with Peter Murray-Rust's JUMBO CML viewer) is one example. Microsoft, I might add, are ardent adoptees of XML. Perhaps the common denominator that
I am presenting a (free) virtual lecture on this next week sponsored by Chemweb Ltd. (no connection) and VEI ; 1998-02-04:16:00 UTC. [Many of you may have attended Henry's virtual lecture - the first in this series - last month.] In this I shall present the basis of XML and its advantages for producing WWW solutions. A new snapshot of JUMBO will be released in alpha this week, and a beta to coincide with the virtual lecture. [JUMBO will *not* be used for the lecture itself, although I see this technology being ready in about 3-6 months time. A major factor will be to what extent browsers support reasonable performance in a platform-independent manner, epsecially Java.] I cannot comment on Netscape's future pplans for XML, but they have been active members of the XML community. Assuming V 5.0 is GPL, then I would expect that high quality XML tools will follow very rapidly (there are already freeware parsers, and browsers are following.) The key difference between plugins and XML (in this area) is that XML supports structured documents. In this way it is possible to integrate "documents" and "data" in a way that is quite impossible at present. I take it for granted, for example, that free, high quality, semantically-aware XML-based mathematics will become available during 1998. This leads directly to the interoperability of MathML and any other XML-based language.
the chemical community was briefly able to achieve during the period 1996-1997 with the "old style" web browser and a plug-in such as Chime was just a temporary phenomenon. Arguably, one might look back to that period as a golden, simple one where many people could be molecularly enfranchised with little effort. We may never see its like again.
Do you want the 5-minute argument or the full half-hour :-)? Seriously, I'd like to call it the dawn of the golden age. Molecular plugins/helpers had the same breathtaking effect as HTML had for text/graphics. XML is the next logical step forward for both. It requires more engineering, but it can deliver a great deal more. P. Peter Murray-Rust (PeterMR, http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~pazpmr) Director, VSMS (Virtual School of Molecular Sciences) Pharmaceutical Sciences, Nottingham Univ. NG7 2RD, UK; T: 44-115-9515087 F: 5110 http://www.vsms.nottingham.ac.uk/ 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)