Including molDB in XHTML

Use cases

There may be a variety of cases in which including molDB information in XHTML (or vice versa) may be appropriate. A few are outlined below.

Using XHTML+CSS to provide a fuller description of compounds

The molDB format does not put any restrictions on the contents of the presence of elements outside the molDB namespace. These elements are simply ignored, along with their contents. Inside of mol elements, the name and suff elements are merely required to be present, but may be present at any depth in the DOM tree. The following fragment is, as such, valid molDB:

    water is a colorless, odorless substance that usually makes up the bulk of hydrated substances.
  

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In this usage; the SKM processor will completely ignore all text not inside of name or suff.

Providing the chemical markup and names of compounds in exercises and technical documents

As part of an exercise in chemistry; molDB could be employed in the following fashion:

  Pour the water into the beaker, and let 400ml of methane run through it.

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Conventions

When using XHTML as an SKM delivery system

When using XHTML as an SKM delivery system, all the trappings of a complete SKM document should be present, and an identifier is required on the moldb element.

When using molDB to attach chemical information to XML text

When using molDB to attach chemical information to XML text, this only requires the use of the mol element with the formula attribute set.