What is (chemical) MIME?
MIME is an IETF standard for labelling electronic documents (files) for transmission between machines by mail or WWW protocols. Every document can be stamped with a MIME content-type such as “text/sgml” or “image/gif”. Thus all documents sent from a WWW server have a content-type provided by the server, which allows the client to decide how to treat it (e.g. what software to use for rendering. In 1994 Henry Rzepa put forward the idea that this could be extended to cover molecular science and he, Ben Whittaker and Peter Murray-Rust published a proposal which has been widely adopted. See the Chemical MIME home page (http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/chemime/). It was originally envisaged that CML would have its own MIME type, and chemical/x-cml was proposed. However, MIME stamps are external to the document and in effect describe how the entire document must be handled. Because it is now recognised that CML is likely to be merely one component within an XML document (i.e. that document may cover mo
