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The Changing Face of Scientific Communication

© Adam Hughes

For most of this century, scientific discovery has been revealed at regular intervals through trade publications and large professional conventions. When a researcher completed a project, or reached a plateau, he published his results, or saved them up for presentation at one of his field's scheduled gatherings. With the advance of the computer age, however, such artificial time constructs as publishing deadlines and annual conventions are being pushed aside, and the open discussion of scientific discovery is becoming an entity with a life of its own. At the center of this revolution is the wide variety of electronic publishing now available to researchers the world over.

Of course, the most visible form of electronic information dissemination is the World Wide Web. With a simple web page, a scientist can display for the world his latest ideas and discoveries, allowing others to both benefit from and possibly make suggestions to enhance his research. The most common vehicle for creating a web page is the Hyper Text Markup Language, or HTML. In HTML, the scientist has a relatively simple computer programming language that gives him control over nearly every design aspect of his web page. There are commands that allow him to control font size and color, image placement, table creation, background appearance, and other aspects of page design. The researcher can truly create almost any kind of layout he wishes and present his work in the most attractive format possible.

While HTML is a very powerful web publishing tool, the great thing for many scientists is that they don't really have to know the language to benefit from it. There are many graphical editors out there, such as Microsoft's FrontPage that make creating a web page as easy as using Word or Powerpoint. Speaking of Word and Powerpoint, these programs also have a neat little conversion utility that automatically transforms your presentation into HTML files, ready for immediate posting to your web site.

In the context of getting information to the masses as quickly and neatly as possible, the HTML is a very powerful tool. It is, however, rather limited in the sense of being a programming language and allowing the developer to do exactly what he wants. The font choices available to the programmer, for instance, are limited to the standard ones defined in the HTML scheme. Of course, scientists are always looking for ways to customize their projects and work environments, so it's probably no surprise that many of them have been searching for something a little more advanced than HTML. The answer for many has been XML, or eXtensible Markup Language. In XML, the programmer

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