[fitsmime] FITS Mime-Types for Mosaics

[Steve Allen]

On Fri 2002-12-06T13:50:01 -0500, William Joye hath writ:
> One other idea. Is there a way we can use the HTTP Meta data field to indicate
> an interpretation of the FITS data (i.e. it is a events bin table, or it is a
> mosaic image...?) this would get around the problems of formally defining new
> mime-types...

That is the question that I begain to raise in my ruminations about
the "Optional parameters" types of parameter fields which are sent
along with the MIME media type.

I do not yet feel familiar enough with the spectrum of usage of
"Optional parameters" in other MIME types to be sure of what we can
and cannot do with them.  In particular, I don't know whether we can
or should submit a RFC which asserts that
	there may be some optional parameters but we don't yet know
	their names or admissible values.
or
	there are some optional parameters, which we have named
	and listed some admissible values, but for which we may
	create more admissible values later.

It is my sense that either of these two possibilities requires FITS to
have some sort of naming authority doing a job akin to that of the
IANA, and that the RFC would have to give reference to at least one
website which publishes the decisions of that naming authority.  The
same sort of naming authority would probably also be able to serve as
a registry of information describing how to interpret various local
conventions of FITS files.  But this all presumes both a technical
mechanism (perhaps some sort of XML as the language?) and a social
mechanism that don't exist.

(Along those lines but tangential, I noted with some horror that I
could only find the FITS standard online from websites within the
United States.)

--
Steve Allen          UCO/Lick Observatory       Santa Cruz, CA 95064
sla at ucolick.org      Voice: +1 831 459 3046     http://www.ucolick.org/~sla
PGP: 1024/E46978C5   F6 78 D1 10 62 94 8F 2E    49 89 0E FE 26 B4 14 93