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Re: Is the chemical media type still used?



Hi,

Am Donnerstag, dem 04.09.2025 um 13:11 +0000 schrieb Geoffrey
Hutchison:
>  Hi,
> 
> I was under the impression that chemistry/* was long ago (1998)
> proposed and registered by Peter Murray-Rust and Henry Rzepa.

There was only a draft and it is officially expired:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-rzepa-chemical-mime-type/

However, there are some tools and support for these MIME types has been
added to various programs.

[..]
> 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.

IMHO there are some counter arguments against registering the chemical-
sub-type. There are other non-chemical formats that don't seem to fit
into application. They could argue that they need their own sub-type as
well. I don't think that the IANA will like that much. And then there
is a long list of standardized formats that are not application-
specific (e.g. office-formats) which are still in application, though,
because they are processed by applications, which is the case for most
or all chemical MIME types.

IMHO it might be an altermative to put all these non-application
specific subtypes into something like application/x-chemicalmime.foo or
application/vnd.chemicalmime.foo (of there is some kind of
vendor/organization behind them) instead of trying to register the
chemical sub-type.

> Anyway, if chemical/* hasn’t officially been registered(!?) it’s news
> to me and I’m sure Peter and Henry among others can help.

I haven't heard of any of the original authours of the draft in years.
But other people involved back then are still around.

Regards, Daniel
> > 

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