There seems to be some kind of a gap between users and developers as far the eagerness to abandon PDB in favour of mmCIF. I myself fully agree with Jeffrey about the ease of manipulating
PDB's during work, particularly when encountering unusual circumstances (and there are many of those, as we all know). And how about non-crystallographers that are using PDB's for visualization and understanding how their proteins work? I teach many such students
and it's fairly easy to explain to them where to look in the PDB for particular pieces of information relevant to the structure. I can't imagine how they'll cope with the cryptic mmCIF format.
>I think the only gap is between developers and *expert* users - most of the community simply wants tools and formats that work with a >minimum of fiddling.
That assumes that you can offer such software, but can you? I doubt that this goal is reachable (in fact our daily experience proves just that), with all due respect to you developers.
>Again, if users are having to examine the raw PDB records visually to find information, this is a failure of the software.
It's not raw, it's easily readable text, very easy to interpret with very little effort.
Anyway, this discussion is a waste of time. The decision has been taken, mmCIF will prevail and we (expert and non-expert users) have to swallow the pill.
Boaz
-Nat