New Interoperability Tools

VML: a new way to manipulate & transfer images

VML(or Vector Markup Language) is a derivative of XML (and thereby its subset) which deals with storing vector information about a picture.

For example the VML string

    
    <v:oval style='width:100pt;height:75pt' fillcolor="red"></v:oval>

would in Internet Explorer produce a red filled oval that looked like:

While GIFs are the most used images on the internet, there are some advantages to using VML based figures:

As VML is vector based, the images can be scaled or rotated without loss or resolution
Microsoft Office understands VML (and uses VML as its format for Word Art) So it is easy to include these pictures into Office applications such as Word or Excel.
Once included it is easy to annotate, add to or transform these pictures
VML pictures if generated right, can be made to occupy much lesser space than GIFs
SVG which is also a standard being adopted by Adobe, is very similar to VML for the few requirements of molecular graphics. So VML molecular depictions can be easily converted to SVG.

Currently the one disadvantage of VML is that, Netscape 6 doesn't yet understand VML.
clogp_vml is an example of a servlet that we have in Mariner that uses smi2vml, a servlet we have created that takes in a SMILES and outputs the VML corresponding to its depiction.