[fitsbits] Start of the FITS MIME type Public Comment Period

[William Pence]

ANNOUNCEMENT:   Start of the Public Comment Period on the
                           FITS MIME type proposal

This is to announce the official start of the 4-week formal Public Comment
Period on the proposal to register 2 new Internet MIME media types for FITS
data files: "image/fits" and "application/fits".

The latest 17-May-2004 draft of the MIME type proposal is available for
comment at http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/fits/mime/.  The draft is available
there in postscript, PDF, and plain text formats.  Listings of the
differences with the previous 2 drafts of the document are also available.

Please submit your comments here on the sci.astro.fits newsgroup, or on the
related FITSBITS moderated mail list.  If you previously submitted comments
that have not been incorporated in this latest draft, and if you feel that
they still need to be addressed, then please submit the comments again.

The previous informal discussions about this FITS MIME proposal on the
'fitsmime' mail list at NRAO may be viewed in the archive at
http://listmgr.cv.nrao.edu/pipermail/fitsmime/.  Other related postings here
on the FITSBITS mail list may be viewed in the archive at
http://listmgr.cv.nrao.edu/pipermail/fitsbits/.  In particular, see the
postings in December 2002, June 2003, and March 2004,

Approval Procedures
-------------------

Under the recently updated "Rules and Procedures" of the IAU FITS Working
Group, the first step in the official approval process of any FITS proposal
will be a formal Public Comment Period to take place here on the
sci.astro.fits newsgroup (and on the moderated FITSBITS mail list that
mirrors all on-topic postings).   At the end of this public comment period
the 3 regional FITS committees (North America, Europe, and Japan) will vote
on the proposal.  Following that the IAU FITS Working Group will then
conduct a final vote to approve or disapprove the proposal.  These rules and
procedures are more fully described at
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/iaufwg/iaufwg_rules.html.

It is important to keep in mind that the proposal currently under discussion 
is simply whether or not to submit the FITS MIME document to the IETF 
(Internet Engineering Task Force) for consideration as an Internet Standard. 
  The proposal will then go through another whole review process before it 
can be adopted as an Internet Standard.  This process is describe in more 
detail in RFC 2026 which is available at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2026.txt.


William Pence
Chairman, IAU FITS Working Group
-- 
____________________________________________________________________
Dr. William Pence                          William.D.Pence at nasa.gov
NASA/GSFC Code 662         HEASARC         +1-301-286-4599 (voice)
Greenbelt MD 20771                         +1-301-286-1684 (fax)