Subject: WWW developments

From: [email-masked] (Steven Bachrach)
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 96 11:40:37 -0600

I will probably get flamed for bringing up this subject as being too far 
removed from comp chem but here goes..

I have been very impressed with a number of web developments like the Tripos
fetch and sketch, and the molecular inventor work of SGI. (If you missed the
demo of this at the ACS meeting, make sure to get your SGI rep or an MSI
rep to show it to you!). I would like to use the plug-in Chime from MDL, but
I'm not a windows user.

Anyways, I would like to poll the community towards their attitudes and
desires in terms of how they would like to see chemical displays develop on
the web. The "old" technology was to provide a compound in one of a variety 
of formats (pdb, xyz, etc), attach a MIME type, and then allow the user to 
provide the molecular viewer locally (like Xmol or RasMol). With the
development of Netscape 2, we now have the Java option (like "fetch and 
sketch") and the plug-in option (like chime). These latter options remove 
the user from selecting the visualization tool. While this has advantages: 
everyone now views the structure in the identical way, no need for the user
to have the appropriate viewer; it also removes the freedom to choose - what 
if you don't like the Java applet provided?

Before we all go and reinvent the wheel, and we have 30 different java 
applets to rotate a molecule, can we discuss what's the "best" way to provide
the data to the general community?

Steve

Steven Bachrach				
Department of Chemistry
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, Il 60115			Phone: (815)753-6863
[email-masked]			Fax:   (815)753-4802