Subject: (chemical) markup languages for writing scientific documents (RE: ACS report part II)

From: Marc Baaden <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 19:11:50 +0200

Dear colleagues,

[email-masked] said:
>> On more directly Web related matters,  two sessions at the ACS had
>> relevance, one on  XML in Chemistry, and another on "The Scientific
>> Article in the digital World".

.. not immediately directly related, but still of relevance (I hope): what
kind of authoring environment would be best adapted to the task of
writing scientific papers, reports, abstracts etc. ?

I have recently been playing around with docbook and refdb (both come in
SGML and XML flavours), and was amazed how far one could get with those
already.

Especially for *computational* chemistry, docbook has all the nice tags
for inclusion of code, screenshots, etc.

But concerning the more chemical and or biological side, I am not sure.

So I wonder: is SGML (or XML) the way forward ? And is there a more adapted
DTD (and stylesheets etc.) for the (bio)-chemical (computational) field ?

.. hoping to stimulate an interesting discussion ..

regards,
  Marc Baaden

-- 
 Dr. Marc Baaden  - Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, Paris
 mailto:[email-masked]      -      http://www.marc-baaden.de
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