Subject: chemical MIME types: Global usage?

From: [email-masked] (Rzepa,Henry) (Rzepa,Henry)
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 1994 16:01:23 +0100

I have heard indirectly that there may be about 7-8 sites around the
world which are marking
e.g. pdb and other types of chemical files with the MIME type

chemical/x-pdb  (the x indicating a proposed rather than ratified standard).

Our Internet draft on this subject will expire in October, and will then
have to be
replaced by a so called RFC, which is the preamble to full ratification.

In order to make as strong a case as possible to the appropriate committees, I
would like to know who has already adopted the standard (for example the NIH).

If anyone knows of such support, either because they actually implemented it,
or have visited e.g. a WWW site that supports it, please let me know. [you
will know they support it if your mailcap entry reads chjemical/x-pdb and your
viewer fires up automatically if you click on a pdb file]

I am also aware that a number of sites support e.g.
image/x-pdb
as an alternative.  I also gather that another of our proposed types, namely

chemical/x-smiles   might be in use. Anyone heard of this?  [I understand
there are actually THREE SMILES definitions; I wonder how we might
differentiate?]

Finally, the NMR community has asked whether there would be any consensus
on a common format for transporting raw FID and other information? It seems
as if all is proprietary in this area, unlike e.g. crystallography.

If all this is mumbo-jumbo to you, then visit
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/chemical_mime.html
for further details.

Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY;
[email-masked] via Eudora 2.02, Tel  (44) 171 594 5774 or 594 5809. Fax:
(44) 171 594 5804
World-Wide-Web URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa.html