Hi all,
I am preparing the next update of the `media-types` package, which
provides the `/etc/mime.types` file.
We have been listing chemical media types in this file since 2003.
This
left a lot of time for software and their file formats to be
progressively replaced. For instance, in my understanding, the `.chm`
(chemical/x-chemdraw) extension used to be used by ChemDraw, but was
then taken over by Windows and now ChemDraw uses a different format,
`.cdxml` (application/vnd.chemdraw+xml).
A bunch of chemical media types are problematic because they declare
file extensions that are taken by other media types, and many software
parsing `/etc/mime.types` have difficulty to handle this. One way they
solve the problem, for instance, is to ignore some or all chemical
media
types.
It is my goal to progresively make `/etc/mime.types` closer and closer
to the data available at
https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml,
including by registering missing types
(https://www.iana.org/form/media-types)
and by removing legacy extra types that lost relevance.
If the chemical top-level media type is still relevant, maybe some
people on this list would like to register it to the IANA? A recent
RFC
was written about how to do such registration, and it mentions
awareness
of the type (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9694.html).
If the chemical media type is not relevant anymore, I would like to
remove it.
What are your thoughts?
Have a nice day,
Charles