Why is the W3C important for CML?
The members of the W3C are (primarily commercial) organisations who have agreed to create communal, non-proprietary protocols for, inter alia, the exchange of information over the WWW. The W3Cs processes are confidential, but its results are open. The cornerstone of this is eXtensible Markup Language (XML), a “very simple subset” of SGML. One of us (PMR) was invited to be part of the initial working group on XML and as a result we suggest that some aspects of the process, as well as the end-product, may be of value to the chemical informatics community.
