Happily theres a solution to the dilemma (for those using the PPS mirror
at BNL) of having either chemical MIME, or a local URL, but not both.
The pdb Web server delivers the pdb files with either a text or chemical
MIME type as you choose, by use of a cgi-bin script:
http://www.pdb.bnl.gov/cgi-bin/get-pdb-entry?id=****&type=view&encoding=none
will stamp the file with mime type chemical/x-pdb, where **** is the
4-letter code. If you replace '&type=view' with '&type=text' then it is
delivered with the plain text MIME type instead. The &encoding=none bit
is also the default, so you should be able to leave this out.
Anyway, we will make use of this in the course material: for each PDB
structure, we will have one link to a URL as above, and another to the
same file on the Bbk Cryst server.
Of course, this only applies to structures which actually exist in the
PDB. For others, such as the structures in Section 3 on geometry, it is
necessary to get the files from across the Atlantic (ie from Bbk), and a
link has now been included in the relevant files. But this is not such a
big problem as the files are small.
John Walshaw j.walshaw@mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk BioMOO: JohnW