Re: Mime types for medical data formats

[Daniel Leidert <daniel.leidert.spam@gmx.net>]

Am Montag, den 31.03.2008, 08:10 +0200 schrieb Andreas Tille:

> I recently learned that file has obviosely no means for detecting biological
> data formats.  Three months ago we had some discussions about Applied
> Biosystems chromatograms[1].  This thread more or less had ended with: We
> are waiting for an answer of the authors.
> 
> Now I wonder whether we could assemble general mime information for
> several biological data formats to enable applications to detect whether
> files have the format they should have.  I think this would be of great
> profit for many applications to be able to easily verify that the input
> format fits the format the applications wants to work with.

As long as there is no agreement with upstream, you can use the

a) x- prefix approach
b) vnd. vendor approach

Both are described in the MIME specification (IIRC i mentioned the RFC
in the discussion). I would suggest the latter for the application/* top
type as long as there is no agreement with upstream.

Regards, Daniel