[fitsbits] FITS MIME RFC ready for review

[Steve Allen]

On Tue 2003-06-03T15:24:09 -0400, Arnold Rots hath writ:
> Uh, does this mean that you retract your earlier proposal to change
> MUST to SHOULD or is it meant to strengthen the argument?
>
> If the latter, then I would argue that we should not put the cart
> before the horse.  SIAP is a prototype and we should not design a
> standard on the basis of usage in a prototype interface.

I do not retract the change from MUST to SHOULD, but I would very much
like to know whether the VO community thinks that "application/fits"
alone serves their current and future needs.

I neglected to mention the existing non-astronomical applications
which currently also use what is effectively "image/fits".
The semantics of FITS files with the standard keywords is currently
very limited.  The grammar the existing standard keywords consists of
NOUNs and ADJECTIVEs.  Is there any standard keyword that functions as
VERB?

The absence of keywords that describe what to do with the data and
metadata in a FITS file is already contrary to the notion embodied by
most other MIME types.  One thing that the MIME type "image/fits" can
do is to allow the server to inform a client that it should be
acceptable to hand the incoming FITS file to a "simple" image browser
like gimp or xv.

In any case, this dearth of VERBs is not going to be remedied without
significant effort on the part of the FITS community.  I believe that
we need a MIME type sooner than that.  In the interim two MIME types
may be a partial remedy.

Note that the IANA rules do permit the MIME media type registrations
to be amended at a later date.  Is the risk of having to refine the
registrations later greater than the urgency with which they are
needed now?

--
Steve Allen          UCO/Lick Observatory       Santa Cruz, CA 95064
sla at ucolick.org      Voice: +1 831 459 3046     http://www.ucolick.org/~sla
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