Chemical markup, XML, and the Worldwide Web. 1. Basic principles

Chemical markup language (CML) is an application of XML, the extensible markup language, developed for containing chemical information components within documents. Its design supports interoperability with the XML family of tools and protocols. It provides a base functionality for atomic, molecular, and crystallographic information and allows extensibility for other chemical applications. Legacy files can be imported into CML without information loss and can carry any desired chemical ontology. Some applications of CML (Markush structures, chemical searching) will be discussed in later articles. An XML document type declaration (DTD) for CML is included as a Chart.