[fitsmime] Re: New MIME-types-for-FITS RFC draft

[William Pence]

Don Wells wrote on 03/30/2004:
>
> See 
>     http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/fits/mime/
> 
> for my second revision of the MIME RFC draft.  I have made almost all
> of the changes that were recommended by the reviewers of the 03-12
> version.  I have noted some outstanding issues on the cover page. 

Looks good overall.  A few more minor comments:

1. Regarding the 3rd 'outstanding issue' that deals with the order of the 
list of data archives, this could be satisfied by adding something like this 
as the 2nd and 3rd sentences in section 4.7:

"There are numerous publicly available archives of FITS files derived from 
both space and ground-based observations that span the entire range of the 
electromagnetic spectrum from radio to gamma-ray wavelengths. Examples of 
such archives, in no particular order, include:"

2.  In the 'Security considerations' section of 5.1, there is a 
parenthetical sentence about how FITS files have never been used to 
transport executable code or viruses.  This may be literally true, but it 
would be easy to transform any executable file into a FITS file just by 
prepending an appropriate 2880-byte header on the front of it.  Are FITS 
files any more secure, or less secure, than other types of files that have a 
'image/xxx' MIME type (e.g., .gif or .jpg files).  If not, then I don't 
think this sentence adds any useful information and should be deleted.

3.  I agree with Mark Calabretta's previous comment that it is not clear 
what is meant in practical terms to say that an application intended to 
handle "application/fits" SHOULD be prepared to encounter arrays with 0 to 
999 dimensions, or random group, other than the previously stated 
requirement that it be able to present a manifest of all the HDUs and all 
the keywords in each HDU.  My suggestion would be to delete those 2 
sentences (i.e., the 2nd and 3rd sentences of the "Recommendations for 
application writers" section of 5.1),  and then modify one of the sentences 
in the "Additional information" section immediately above it to read: "The 
PHDU or any "IMAGE" XHDU may contain zero to 999 dimensions with zero or 
more pixels along each dimension."  The order of that sentence, and the one 
that follows it, should be reversed.

4.  Lucio Chiappetti suggested adding, under the "Recommendations for 
application writers", that applications should offer users the option to 
save the FITS file to a disk file.  Is there some reason for not doing this?

regards,
Bill
-- 
____________________________________________________________________
Dr. William Pence                          William.D.Pence at nasa.gov
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