With the new era of 8-10 m telescopes the power to spectroscopically examine the light of fainter and more distant targets has taken a 'photon' leap. It is now becoming routinely possible to obtain high signal-to-noise spectra of very distant objects and to attempt the determination of their abundances. The motivation for a workshop on this topic could be summarized thus: Do we understand enough about chemical abundances at zero redshift to trust any conclusions on chem- ical evolution at high redshift? Given our observational background in gaseous nebulae, we thought at first in terms of a...