I stand to be corrected but doesn't Mozilla do all of these things? I strongly encourage all to support the Mozilla project - the more that do the less the likelihood that M$ will ultimately set the whole web agenda.

http://www.mozilla.org/

The Mozilla project is opensource in the sense that many separate developers appear to be contributing code to it. Thus http://www.croczilla.com/svg seems to be the main thrust towards SVG (but this by a single person, who does it in their "spare time"). As I have noted at this forum previously, this offers one interesting way forward for rendering chemistry from well specified data structures. But Netscape/Mozilla seems to be developing with lots of what one might call omissions, or holes, in their features. On another forum for example, the lack of LDAP support was commented on, implementation of which again seems to be coming from one particular group in the opensource effort. I have a particular interest in the use of X.509 certificates to authenticate, support for which was excellent in Netscape 4.7, but only about 50% there in Netscape 6.1 (remember, 6.1 is supposed to be a full release, not a beta, and is not supposed therefore to have features missing). The message that strongly comes over is that one must design things such that the data, the logic and the rendering are kept quite separate. This of course makes it particularly tricky to design "friendly" sites where lots of JavaScript and other content/logic/rendering is often used to create a usable interface. Think of the amount of javascript (of unknown standard or specification) in sites such as the NCI or Protein Explorer databases. Most sites also have a great deal of "CGI" hidden server side processing going on. Once that server-side resource stops (or its domain is purchased!) then all the data and content it represented is lost! In that sense, we are back to where we were in 1993, pre-web. -- Henry Rzepa. Imperial College, Chemistry Dept. +44 020 7594 5774 (Office) +44 020 7594 5804 (Fax) 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)