Re: Is the chemical media type still used?
Hi,
I was under the impression that chemistry/* was long ago (1998) proposed and registered by Peter Murray-Rust and Henry Rzepa.
"The Application of Chemical Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (Chemical MIME) Internet Standards to Electronic Mail and World Wide Web Information Exchange"
Their initial MIME table is at:
Some of these types (e.g. VMD) are perhaps application-specific. But there are a large number of interchange formats in chemistry used by many formats, and I believe are still in widespread use (including clipboard types):
.mol / .sdf chemical/x-mdl-molfile
.cif chemical/x-cif
.xyz chemical/x-xyz
.pdb chemical/x-pdb
.cml chemical/x-cml
.fch / .fchk chemical/x-formatted-checkpoint
.cub / .cube chemical/x-cube
.jdx chemical/x-jcamp-dx
.spc chemical/x-galactic-spc
.smi / .smiles chemical/x-smiles
I can think of probably another 5-10 interchange formats that weren’t on that list in 1998 (.mol2 comes to mind) that don’t seem like a good for for application/* because they’re not application-specific.
Anyway, if chemical/* hasn’t officially been registered(!?) it’s news to me and I’m sure Peter and Henry among others can help.
Best regards,
-Geoff
---
Prof. Geoffrey Hutchison (he/him)
Department of Chemistry
University of Pittsburgh
tel: (412) 648-0492
It's a good question.
Good idea to keep the media types up to date.
One of the applications using the chemical media types could be Avogadro
(and openbabel).
I'm cc:ing the developer, Geoff Hutchison, who may have some thoughts
and opinions on the question.
Geoff: this question has been raised on the Debian Science mailing list,
https://lists.debian.org/debian-science/. Andrius Merkys made a reply
in-thread,
https://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2025/09/msg00001.htmlDrew Parsons
On 2025-09-03 15:12, Charles Plessy wrote:
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
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