> I would like Konrad to give us his impression of BioML. It would be I don't think my opinion is so relevant; my field of work is rather different from the Loci project. I work on structures, and BioML does not seem to have any provision for structures at all. Which is fine, of course, not everything has to be designed for my needs ;-) My complaint with CML is that it claims to handle biomolecular structures and does it badly. > the licensing. The Web page says to contact David Fenyo about the > "commercial" use of BioML. I wonder if this is one of those "well, I am not even sure that a data format is copyrightable. If it is, the current downloadable DTD does not contain any copyright statement or usage restrictions, so I don't see why it shouldn't be used for commercial applications. That aside, I did notice a couple of strange features in and about BioML that make me wonder whether it is the format of choice. First, and most importantly, I have the impression that the inventors have not quite understood the point of XML - separating content from layout. BioML contains some purely graphical entity definitions, for example ¶graph; defined as &newline;&tab;. In my opinion such things should never appear in XML files. Paragraphs should be marked up with a paragraph tag, whose visual interpretation is left to a stylesheet definition. Second, the BioML inventors seem to be more Windows-centric than Microsoft itself. Who would have the crazy idea of offering documentation in portable HTML format only as a self-extracting archive for Windows? Of course this doesn't affect the language, but I'd hate to see the next release contain tags for defining COM objects... Konrad. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Konrad Hinsen | E-Mail: hinsen at cnrs-orleans.fr Centre de Biophysique Moleculaire (CNRS) | Tel.: +33-2.38.25.55.69 Rue Charles Sadron | Fax: +33-2.38.63.15.17 45071 Orleans Cedex 2 | Deutsch/Esperanto/English/ France | Nederlands/Francais -------------------------------------------------------------------------------