W3C, in case you did not know, is the World Wide Web Consortium, the body which manages Web standards. It has a UK office (one of 7 world wide) and this year, this office (at RAL) organised an open meeting to disseminate future developments. Lest you are wondering what the relevance to chemistry is, let me emphasize that as "small players", its essential we re-use generic technologies and methods in developing our own subject. What follows is a brief personal report of this meeting. 1) Jon Bosak on XML. XML is a data centric model (compared to HTML which might be described as a text-centric model). Jon emphasised that XML comes into its own with complex datasets, where data can be used in different ways, data with long life cycles, and data intended to drive scripts, Java, etc. All of which suits chemistry particularly well. He re-iterated the separation between data content, its structure and its presentation and how XML has been designed from the outset to achieve this separation. With this combination, Jon showed how online formatting of information will shortly be regarded as a superset of the print format. This will set the cat amongst the pigeons, since much of the chemistry community still regards "print" as the ultimate definer of "chemical knowledge". Jon concluded by describing how an association might be achieved between XML "elements" and application components, ie expressed as JavaBeans. He strongly recommended OASIS (Organisation for advancement of structured information standards; http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/ ). 2) Subsequent speakers developed the theme of the "document" as an application, and Reuters in particular showed how XML could play a vital role in their kind of business. Several presenters showed how a newspaper front page could be created from structured documents and applied styles. My thoughts turned to how an electronic journal article might be presented to the user in the context of how they might want to use it, as an alternative to the "house style". 3) Stu Weibel of OCLC (Mr metadata) empahasised the three "S" components, semantics, structure and syntax. Semantics is achieved via definitions such as the Dublin Core, structure via formalisms such as the RDF (Resource description framework) and Syntax using XML. RDF could eg be used to support XML conversions from one element set to another as a process for supporting inter-operability. Everything is pretty abstract at this level, and RDF is not in the "intuitive" category. 4) Other presenters showed how style sheets are evolving from 1st gen (CSS1) to second (CSS2) and how XSL (Extensible style sheets) used with XML could also be used to transform XML from one application to another. It was also noted that work on expressing HTML as an XML element set was well under way, ie HTML (5?) would in future be an implementation of XML. Mention was made of Internet Explorer 5.0, Netscape "GECKO" and Opera 3.5, the first two at least supporting XML. 5) There was an interesting presentation about Scalable Vector Graphics, and its intended role in replacing GIF images! SMIL is a multimdedia format with timelines etc for use in presentations; its more declarative than eg Macromedia director (ie relies less on use of scripts), although Microsoft have decided to go a different way with HTML-TIME. 6) Finally the BBC gave a presentation on the integration of digital broadcasting with the Web. The interesting concept of a URI (Uniform resource identifier) describing a time-dependent broadcast resource (ie a program) is something it seems we will have to get used to. Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY; mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804. URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ If my digital email signature is invalid, download a new root at http://www.belsign.be/en/services/receive/install-ca.html 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)