Chemical MIME types
Chemical MIME types are a proposed standard for communicating chemical information over the computer network. Dr. Henry Rzepa of the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College, London has played a major role in formulating the standard and has written a very nice page on how to set up your browser to make use of these types.
Chemical MIME Types Information
3D Structures
3D coordinates for each compound are usually available by clicking on the 2D structure image. The coordinates are served as the chemical/x-mdl-molfile MIME type (MDL MOLfile). The default action of most browsers is to write this file to disk. If you wish to have your browser display the 3D image, you must make it aware of the chemical/x-mdl-molfile MIME type and have it call up a display program when this type is encountered.
We use the program RasMol written by Roger Sayle at Glaxo Research and Development.
An even simpler and more powerful way to display 3D structures has released by MDL. They have a browser plugin called Chime which is available for various operating systems and browser configurations. It is largely based on RasMol (at least the display part) and so the RasMol Home Page also contains very useful information and dicussion about how to use Chime.
Another commercial company, CambridgeSoft has released a net version of their ChemDraw and Chem3D software, which can also be configured to display 3D structures.
Biological Data
All biological data is served as .html files. The mean graph format display use html tables and images that may rendered differently on specific browsers.
Scalable Vector Graphics
Some data and graphics are available in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format A plug in for most browsers and operating systems is available from Adobe.Adobe SVG download page