Chemical MIME

Glenn Proctor (proctor@yorvic.york.ac.uk)
Fri, 31 Mar 95 11:32:53 GMT

Hi everyone

I'm having some rather confusing problems using PDB URLs. Let me
elaborate.

Here at York we use an in-house PDB viewer called Molviewer, rather
than RasMol. This is started via

molviewer <pdb file>

So my .mime.types file has an entry that looks like

application/pdb pdb PDB

and the corresponding .mailcap entry is

application/pdb; /usr/sg15/people/mjh/bin/molviewer.tcl %s

(the path is correct).

When I run

netscape <local pdb file>

it brings up molviewer with the correct file, or

netscape <local pdb directory>

it brings up the directory; clicking on a pdb file starts molviewer properly.

Problems arise when I use other pdb files (e.g. the one on the Technology page)
I get the "Save to local disk" requester, indicating that netscape hasn't
"recognised" the file.

I've tried this with Mosaic and Emacs W3 so I'm pretty sure it's not a
Netscape-specific problem.

One thing I have noticed is that the pdb URLs that work are, for example

<A HREF="/usr/sg17/people/proctor/pdb/1abf.pdb">

while

<a href=1crn.pdb>pdb file</a>

does _not_ seem to work.

Is it a problem with the relative addressing mechanism in the http protocol?

I'm working on a SGI Indigo running IRIX 5.2.

Look forward to hearing from you

Glenn.

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Glenn Proctor Protein Structure Research Group Voice: +44 (0) 904 432573
Internet: proctor@yorvic.york.ac.uk Fax: +44 (0) 904 432519
WWW: http://www.yorvic.york.ac.uk/~proctor/
York University Protein Structure Research Group, Heslington, York, England.
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