Following up on my earlier posting, it struck me that one interesting immediate application is to use it as an aggregator for seminars and talks given at various university departments and elsewhere. Such does not really exist in any (maintainable) form, and a little thought suggests that the ways of communicating interesting talks by people are relatively un-impacted by eg the Web etc (most explicit lists of colloquia are normally mounted as eg an Acrobat file, and not updated for years!) So http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/view.cgi?rss_url=http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/index.r... is another way of viewing an RSS feed on merely a Web browser (as an easier alternative to installing it into an RSS aware client. The above does not really handle the metadata properly; thus the date of each seminar is declared as so called DC data and hence only viewed by a program that can process it. It follows of course that one could sort such RSS feeds by eg data (week, month, year etc) or perhaps by location, and certainly by topic or speaker. Thus you might use it to find out any presentations on asymmetric catalysis in Edinburgh in 2003 (I cannot wait to see the ACS national meeting lists so presented, finding something in the 5000 or so talks and posters is always a challenge!). On the premise that one should only introduce one acronym per message, I will note http://www.opml.org/ which is a sort of meta-metadata description. Thus collections of RSS feeds (or subscriptions) can be outlined using opml, and a set of subscriptions generated in one program can be imported into another using a .opml file (many of the RSS clients support this). And on a historic note, I find it interesting that the first use of such outlining files was by Doug Engelbart in the 1960s (he of the invention of the mouse and much more). OPML files, by the way can be "viewed" by the appropriate stylesheet transform (eg <?xml:stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="opml.xslt" version="1.0"?> a process which illustrates that the family of XML languages can be converted from one to the other, with only as much information loss as you wish to occur. You will no doubt appreciate that "chemistry" can participate in this process quite happily via its own XML sub-family (which includes eg the CML family, now about five strong by the way). Also on the above theme, I hope its only a matter of time before "industrial strength" programs such as e.g. EndNote start to support RSS and the concepts outlined above. -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, 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)