Subject: www, gopher and others. What every chemist should know!

From: [email-masked] (Henry Rzepa) (Henry Rzepa)
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 1994 18:05:22 +0000

>But when you begin to write about mosaic, www, http, html+, etc, I am in
>trouble and I am sure I am not the only one : can you explain in a few
>words what these things are ? I suppose other readers of the watoc list or
>the computational chemistry list would also appreciate such a glossary.

Following the above request, here is a brief potted summary of these
tools. For those of you who are already using them, please ignore.

Gopher.  A server program for a distributed database of files, containing
useful information, not only locally, but with pointers to other useful sites.
The server normally runs on a Unix workstation, but can in fact also run
happily on
a Mac (and probably PC). It provides to end users not only text files,
but binary files (ie programs) or documents (eg MS Word), pictures
(ie gif or pict). A new version called gopher+ also serves up eg
video (ie quicktime or mpeg), sounds (ie ulaw) and
other types of files. Few gophers are yet up to + standard.
Our gopher+ is gopher.ch.ic.ac.uk.
To connect, use  a client program and make sure your computer
is connected to the internet, with an assigned IP address. This can
be done with an ethernet card and eg PC-NFS 5.0B (for PC),
or MacTCP 2.04. You can also do this from home. On a Mac, I
use MacTCP 2.04, another program called MacPPP 2.02 and
a 14.4K modem, connecting to a "PPP" server. In my case, this
is an Annex server connected to our institutional ethernet.

The client program on a Mac is called Turbogopher. The interface is
designed to be as easy as pssible to use. You click on the file and
over it comes. On a PC it is called hGopher, on Unix XGopher. You
may also need "helper programs", ie viewers for the images, or the
movies or sounds. Gopher will help you find this.

World-wide-Webb.  A Hypermedia based system. Basically, the same
types of files as above, but where the cross referencing links are done within
the files themselves, rather than at the server level.  Uses a script called
"html". Anyone who is familiar with eg MTROFF or early non
WYSIWYG word processors will feel at home! To connect, get a
"Browser" such as NCSAMosaic (availble for PC, Mac and Unix). Feed
it a "URL" such as the one below. Some text will be highlighted, which means
you can click on it to get something more (ie more text, pictures, sounds etc).
The cross references mean you can start off on one topic and end up somewhere
else. This is what distinguishes it from gophers. For example, the new Hubble
space pictures were made available within hours of being processed!

To author material using www requires some tools, ie write what you want
in eg MS Word, including all diagrams etc, save as an rtf file, and then use a
program called rtf2html to convert to html. Mount this in a specified
directory on the www server. The latter is again normally Unix, but can
quite safely be eg a Mac.

html+.  Raw html is not quite suitable for chemists, ie no greek letters, no
superscripts, tables etc. html+ is supposed to address all these issues, but
it is not available yet.

There is much I have missed out, but I hope this helps.

PS Hundreds of requests for all this software will not be answered by me.
Sorry! I could not cope. Get it using Mosaic from NCSA themselves.

Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY;
[email-masked] via Eudora 2.01, Tel:+44  71 225 8339, Fax:+44 71 589 3869.
>From June '94: (44) 171 584 5774, Fax: (44) 171 584 5804
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa.html