If we think of e-journals as just electronic renditions of their linear paper cousins, then we are missing an important opportunity. We need an outlining format that is a radical departure from the one we learned in high school (and rarely used). Dominick hints at such a tool in his comments about tagging elements in the document. If we could represent the e-document at varying levels of detail (i.e., varying levels of outline), with non-linear links to other sections or to more detail, then I think we would have an important new resource. But until we are comfortable with abandoning the linear mode of presentation, then anything we do will suffer from the limitation we drag along from our reliance on paper. We will always be at the mercy of the current display technology, although that technology is getting better and better. I can still flip a page in a regular book faster than I can reach for my mouse. But I am forced with the book to follow the author's linear outline, with all levels of detail revealed equally. If, on the other hand, I had a "smart" display that would show me the parts of the article in the order I prefer and at the detail I prefer, then I would call that progress. Bob Swofford Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, NC ryanmd@mms.sbphrd.com on 06/02/97 02:22:41 PM Please respond to ryanmd@mms.sbphrd.com To: chemweb@ic.ac.uk cc: (bcc: Robert L Swofford/WFU) Subject: Re: Screen vs Paper for E-journals ... The trouble comes from the fact that one very often needs to scan prior to digging into the details and even PDF docs are not very good for this, performance is just not there, one has to zoom in and out, pages take to long to draw, the viewer takes too long to start up. Some of this will no doubt improve as both depiction code and hardware speed up. But the standard monitors/resolution/page sizes will take longer to address. ... I imagine a browser-like interface that allows you to tag element pages with properties such as "Background", "Data evidence", "hypothesis", "flame-bait" together with a unique project (publication?) code. Given document elements could have multiple project codes attached to facilitate zillion part articles. Then a standardized chemistry (science?) journal article browser would know how to assemble the parts. With standardized elements there could be greater transparent hyperlinking between elements. chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)