Colleague It really is time there was a clear path forward for Chemical content on the web. How can this happen? I do not know, but I suspect that it is going to get a lot clearer in the next year or two. It has to or the www will fail in a kind of alphabet soup (see note in InfoWorld http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?980715.wipatrick.htm). One encouraging sign is that the Search Engines are growing up and are trying to differentiate themselves by becoming Portals and also by trying to offer exceptional specialised search services. One of these Portals needs to do a deal with CAS or Reed Elsevier and start offering specialised chemistry content searching function. Which will it be? AltaVista, Excite, InfoSeek, Yahoo, etc? What technology will they use? XML, simple text searching with metatags or some database derived technology? Some portion of the chemical community ought to show them how to do it. Or could this service be provided by a specialist Chemistry Portal. In which case ChemWeb (the other one) looks like the best bet. Any views? Adam --- --- Adam Hodgkin | e-mail: adam@cherwell.com Chairman | Phone: +44 (0)1865 784810 Cherwell Scientific Publishing | Fax: +44 (0)1865 784801 Oxford OX4 4GA, UK | URL: http://www.cherwell.com --- --- 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)