[fitsbits] MIME for compressed FITS?

[Rob Seaman]

On May 22, 2007, at 2:28 PM, William Thompson wrote:

>> Comments on whether a tile compressed FITS image should require a   
>> MIME Content-encoding?
>
> I would read this to mean that the entire file was gzipped,  
> including the header, not just a part of the file.

Sorry, I copied from another discussion and lost a lot of the context.

An image/fits is a "SIF" - an image array in a single primary HDU.

An application/FITS can be any conforming FITS object such as MEF -  
but few clients will know what to do with it.

A gzip'ed FITS SIF file remains an image/FITS, but with a content  
encoding (or possibly a transfer encoding).

What is a FITS tile compressed SIF file?  It remains an application/ 
FITS, but can it be promoted (if that is the right word) to image/ 
FITS with a different content encoding?  (It remains a coherent  
representation of a single image.)  Steve appears to assert "no" and  
that the vast internet community will have no truck with the (even  
vaster in physical domain) astronomical community.

The alternative is to turn application/FITS into something useful, I  
suppose.

Do we need to consider another round of MIME murmurings?  Failing  
that, is MIME really of any value to FITS?

Rob