[fitsbits] FITS Mime Type for gzipped bintable

[Norman Gray]

Greetings.

On 2013 Jun 11, at 17:24, Joe Hourcle <oneiros at grace.nascom.nasa.gov> wrote:

> 'Content coding' refers to the whole file being compressed in some
> manner : 
> 	http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-3.5
> 
> So someone might ask for 'file.fits' and you send the whole thing
> gzip'd with a note via the 'Content-Encoding' HTTP header that it
> needs to be ungzip'd
> 
> As for the mime type -- it's just 'application/fits'. 

+1 to this.  There's no need, and indeed it's probably wrong, to create a separate 'gzipped' version of a MIME type.

It's not completely clear to me what the procedure is for creating a new content-coding value (such as for tile-compression), other than that it should be registered with IANA.

Incidentally, the "x-" mechanism for using unregistered media types is now firmly deprecated (see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6648.txt) and there are new procedures for streamlined registration of new types <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6838.txt>, as Steve mentioned.

All the best,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK