Internet chemical MIME

This article covers the work being carried out to define a set of guidelines for Internet message bodies for files containing chemical related data. An Internet Draft was written and made available for comment and a discussion group initiated. Problems have arisen following discussions with the computer scientists comprising the "Internet Engineering Task Force" (IETF) who, although being the "de-facto" standards body for the Internet, did not feel themselves competent to assess the Draft. In order to make progress with this concept a IUPAC working party, chaired by Dr Henry Rzepa, has been set up to carry out an assessment of this work and report to the new IUPAC Committee on Printed and Electronic Publishing. Once the draft is accepted and published under the IUPAC banner it is hoped that the IETF will ratify the newly defined mail content "chemical".