I am getting regular queries from people interested in setting up chemical RSS feeds. Some general advice I have found is useful (a) Use standard RSS 1.0 (rather than the older 0.91 etc) (b) Add <?xml-stylesheet href="http://www.w3.org/2000/08/w3c-synd/style.css" type="text/css"?> to the top, being a CSS stylesheet which renders the contents sensible on Web browsers. Another way of doing this is http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/view.cgi?rss_url=http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/index.r... which applies an XSLT stylesheet (rather than CSS) to achieve a rather more flexible rendering. I expect that this approach could also be used to eg preselect items of interest from the RSS (c) Its also useful to deploy DC metadata (particularly date, but also author) so that items can be sorted by these categories (not all RSS clients display these fields, but the better ones do!) Do it like follows <dc:creator>Henry Rzepa</dc:creator> <dc:date>2003-05-21T16:15:00-05:00</dc:date> <dc:subject>Biological and biophysical chemistry</dc:subject> Interestingly, I attended a "semantic Web road show" yesterday where one example of a challenging search was presented as "where do I find an article written by X in the year Y on the topic Z" (If anyone can get Google to respond sensibly to such a query let me know!) Of course, you will realise that including the creator, the date and the subject in an RSS field merely requires the RSS client to perform booleans on these fields (A= and B= and C= ). Sadly, no RSS client appears yet quite capable of such actions (but we hope it will come with V 2 of such clients!) Also on the horizon are "peer2peer" RSS clients, whereby if a local search of RSS channels and items therein draws a blank, it can go off and search other peers in the "community", much in the mannere that eg Gnutella does for eg Music. As an aside, we investigated Gnutella and its cousins a few years back, but the almost total lack of meta data included in this formalism meant that the only meaningful searches could be conducted on filename, which turned out not to be productive. I have not revisited this recently, but if anyone who has up to date information on peer2peer file sharing systems knows more please let this list know! -- 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)