Subject: Chemistry MIME types.

From: [email-masked] (Henry Rzepa) (Henry Rzepa)
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 1994 17:43:45 +0000

Along with increasing use of world wide webb information browsers
comes a recognition that we need to use "live" chemical information,
not just pretty "bitmap" images. The content of any particular file is
defined by its "MIME type". Hence these can be text, image,
audio, video, application etc etc. There are in fact 7 primary types.
Under this there are sub-sets, for example
application/word to indicate a word document etc. It struck me that we
need perhaps an 8th type, for chemistry. For example;

chemistry/pdb
chemistry/csd
chemistry/cif

etc etc. The user would associate each with their favourite "viewer",
ideally capable of picking up  the qualifier and treating it accordingly.
One might even one day get intelligent e-mail programs that would convert
the chemical mime type into an on-screen structure, embedded amongst
the text etc.

I sent this suggestion to Nathaniel Borenstein, one of the two (?) global
coordinators of the MIME initiative, and received a highly enthusiastic
response for the general concept. However, he urged the community to
prepare an Internet discussion document to thrash out the detail. To
provide material for such a document, I now solicit the net. But keep it
short please!

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