[fitsbits] TDIMn

[William Pence]

William Thompson wrote:
> I noticed that the WCS Paper III mentions that there's a pending motion 
> before the FITS committees to make the TDIMn keyword official.  I was 
> wondering what the status of that motion was.

This motion was deferred until the FITS committees were reorganized earlier 
this year and until after the recent consideration of the FITS MIME type and 
the Australia/New Zealand FITS committee proposals.  Now that that work is 
out of the way, one of the next orders of business for the FITS committees 
should be to consider this motion.

This motion proposes to incorporate Appendix B.1 and B.2 into the official 
FITS Standard  (the appendices are currently unofficial).  Both appendices 
apply to FITS binary tables: B.1 describes the Variable Length Array 
facility, and B.2 describes the TDIMn keyword. (See 
http://archive.stsci.edu/fits/fits_standard/node74.html).  There is also a 
third appendix, B.3, dealing with substring arrays, but only a portion of 
this proposed convention has ever been used or implemented (to my 
knowledge), so only part of this appendix, if any, should be considered for 
incorporation into the FITS Standard.

If anyone has any issues or concerns about making these appendices part of 
the official FITS format Standard, now would be a good time to raise them 
here on this newsgroup.  The FITS committees will likely be considering this 
issue soon, later this year.

Bill Pence
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____________________________________________________________________
Dr. William Pence                          William.D.Pence at nasa.gov
NASA/GSFC Code 662         HEASARC         +1-301-286-4599 (voice)
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