Newsletter contents...

CCP4 Looks 
      and 
     Leaps into the web...

As of version 3.3, CCP4 will have its documentation in HTML format to be viewed with any web browser. Although you will use the documentation installed on your own workstations it is also recommended that you occasionally visit the CCP4 WWW home pages. You will open your local copy of the documentation either by using the new command ccp4help, defined in the ccp4.setup file, or by using a File/Open File option from your browser and opening the file INDEX.html in the $CCP4/html/ directory. The reasons for using your local copy of the documentation is three fold:

1) Speed.

Accessing your local files is still a lot faster than accessing remote files.

2) Version compatibility.

The documentation you will have on your server will be specific to the programs you are running.

3) Browser/Server Problems.

Because many servers assume that a text document is written in html, actual text documents will appear as one long string. This is not a problem with the program documentation (or files with the .txt extension) but the documentation is slowly being changed to include (instead of examples) links to actual runnable examples in $CEXAM. If you find that example script opened as files by your web browser appear as garbage you should check your browsers preferences to ensure it defaults to text files and not html files. It is because of this problem that all old example scripts with the .sh and .csh extensions have been changed to .exam because browsers such as Netscape would not easily allow you to view these files as formatted text files.

The CCP4 home pages contain information about the electronic mailing list, a reference list to some of the programs and information about the ftp server here at Daresbury as well as our mirror sites in the USA and Japan. The site also has a suggestion box where you can voice your concerns or suggestions to CCP4 in private! The most important thing to check is the problems page. If anyone finds an undesirable feature in any of the CCP4 programs, and we think you should know about it then this is where you will find the information.

A recent use of our web site is in archive retrieval. You can already access the most recent issues of this newsletter and now, new for 1997, you will soon be able to view the Study Weekend Proceedings in HTML. The availability of the proceedings on the web will coincide with their usual distribution. I would like to thank all the contributors to the 1997 Proceedings for their help in in making the proceedings available in this new media. If any authors of past releases of the CCP4 Study weekend proceedings still have an electronic copy of their manuscript and would like to see their contributions available on the web, sooner rather than later, please contact me! Although every possible care has been taken to ensure the accurate conversion to the HTML versions of the Proceedings I cannot guarantee that they will be 100% correct. As anyone who has ever tried to display a page containing greek character on the web will tell you, it does not always go to plan and some details may have been corrupted in the conversion process. Please let me know it you find anything which does not seem quite right! That is one good thing about displaying thing in this way - they can be corrected.

So can we see the day that the web pages will have pictures in documentations, mpg movie files with sound tracks instead of example files, JAVA scripts replacing the suite so there would be no platform dependencies and always the newest version....... probably not yet, but as the next generation of programmers enter the field there will surely be changes.

Newsletter contents...