[fitsmime] FITS MIME Considerations

[William Thompson]

Lucio Chiappetti wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, William Pence wrote:
> 
> > Since the data are always assumed to be in FITS format, it would be
> > redundant to add an extra '.fits' to every filename,
> 
> > ad60033000g200270h.evt  (event file)
> > xh30216010404_b0c.lc    (light curve)
> 
> I agree with Bill (I actually expected him to quote also .rmf (response
> matrix files), .arf (ancillary response files) and .pha (spectra) !)
> 
> > One current mission that does add a FITS suffix to every filename is
> > XMM-Newton,
> 
> unfortunately ! But their s/w has been designed more by engineers than
> by astronomers :-)
> 
> On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, William Thompson wrote:
> 
> > The extension of the file should always tell you what the format of
> > the file is, i.e. whether it is FITS, CDF, netC$ HDF, etc., or even
> > one of the image formats, GIF, JPEG, etc.  I feel very strongly about
> > that.
> 
> My feeling is opposite. If I go into a library in an English-speaking
> country, I do not care to find shelfs labelled as "books in english", but
> more by topic, history, fiction, science and so on. So I'd like that the
> extension tells me (human user) that the file is a spectrum, an image, a
> response matrix.

I guess this just reflects the different worlds we live in.  For a number of
people on this list, it seems that the answer is "of course it's FITS, what else
would it be?"  In my world, it's not as obvious as that.  For the SOHO project
there was debate whether we should go with FITS or CDF, and we ended up using
both, depending on the instrument.  They're both considered standards for
portions of our field, and I've certainly seen data in other formats as well.

To use your analogy, I can't go into the bookstore and just assume that all the
books are going to be in English.  Finding the same book translated into
multiple languages is also a strong possibility, and I expect the book cover to
tell me which one I'm going to be able to read.

Of course having the filename tell you whether the file contains an image or a
spectrum is extremely useful, but telling you what format the data is in is
fundamental.

William Thompson