Using VMD as a Web/MIME Helper Application

When a web browser receives a document from a server it actually gets two pieces of information; the header and the body. The header contains information about the message and body. One of the most important pieces of data, called the MIME type, specifies what the body of text describes. For instance, a GIF image is given the MIME type of image/gif, a JPEG image is image/jpg, and postscript is application/postscript. A class of types, chemical/*, has been created for chemical models so the MIME type for PDB files is chemical/pdb, for XYZ is chemical/xyz, etc.

The web browser uses the MIME type to determine how to view the body of the message. Some of the documents are viewed by the browser itself, like text/html which describes HTML documents. In other cases, the browser has to start up another application. For the chemical/* types, the browser can start up and pass information to VMD. This feature can be used for collaborative research, teaching, and more.