[fitsmime] FITS MIME welcome and initial agenda

[Steve Allen]

Greetings and welcome to all on the fitsmime list.

Don Wells has arranged for this list to be hosted at NRAO, and the
initial membership is composed of a very small handful of folks whom I
have contacted in the past few weeks.

The initiative for this effort came out of a query from Bill Joye
who has been implementing various VO features in ds9.  He has
encountered a wide variety of different MIME types already being
used by various astronomical archive servers.  The time seems ripe
to begin making official the marriage between FITS and the internet.

The list server should have informed everyone of the web interface
for managing subscriptions.  If not, it is at
http://listmgr.cv.nrao.edu/mailman/listinfo/fitsmime

There are two items on my initial agenda:

Membership

I believe the existence of this list should be publicly announced
to the fitsbits mail list and to various VO mail lists.
Also, there are almost certainly other individuals who should
be specifically invited into the mail list.

Please feel free to invite others onto this list.

Draft Documents

In order to register MIME types officially the FITS community will
have to submit a registration request to the IANA in tandem with an
RFC to the IETF/IESG.  The details of this process, a draft of the
combined RFC and registration requests are visible on this web page

http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/fits/mime/

There is also a lot of my own commentary on issues that I think this
mailing list will have to consider before the draft can be submitted
for approval by FITS or internet committees.

I am not certain how much discussion on the content of the drafts
should begin in advance of the general announcement of this list.
I am open to suggestions on that matter.

--
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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