Hi, I'm updating my web page to include some pages related to computational and quantum chemistry. I was wondering about how to include equations and other such material. The first thing that comes to mind is using GIF's (say by converting a LaTeX doc). But are there any other ways. Would it be a good idea to use MathML. Is CML a viable alternative?

Can I suggest a) SVG for vector diagrams. They have much greater advantage over bitmaps since they scale, can be searched etc. Take a look at http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/svg/ for some chemical examples. I belive the latest version of JChemPaint also exports SVG, as does Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw and other programs (Software developers note please: we need SVG transforms in the export filters of your programs0. b) Take a look at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/ which has lots of examples in MathML, and appropriate stylesheet transforms for display. The latest builds of the Mozilla browser include both SVG and MathML Amaya is another browser with native support for SVG. c) CML is not per se a display format, but a data handling protocol (just like MathML) Thus in general to display CML, one would have to apply a stylesheet. Thus http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/chimeral/ and http://www.xml-cml.org/ have lots of examples on how CML can be transformed for display purposes (see Chemcomm, 2000, p 1471-1472 and http://www.rsc.org/suppdata/CC/b0/b002483j/supplemental/b002483j.xml for the raw XML/CML that is used to produce the effect ) One of these methods is Peter Murray-Rust's Jumbo3-JS, a JavaScript implementation of the CML (DOM) which produces SVG output for display. Another is eg Flash 5, which can parse CML and render the output, we are experimenting with a 3D format called JMVS; there are no doubt many more. We have about 4 articles in press which will appear over the next few months which will describe all this in detail. To summarise, the question above is I think one about "how does one display this". Nowadays, the answer is how does one express the information semantically and then transform it for display on any specified medium or device (ie one could squirt the information into a modelling program instead of a browser screen etc etc). -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (0)20 7594 5774 (Office) +44 (0870) 132-3747 (eFax) Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY, UK. http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ 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)