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MIME types for all file formats formally registered with IANA #407
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Yes indeed, this would be good. I got started on preparing the applications a while back. Perhaps I can dig out those drafts and we can collaborate on getting them done. Do you have experience of doing this previously? |
@jmarshall zero experience :D But it is at least written down in all the RFCs what to put together. I'm tired of having VCFs open as v-cards in windows, and all the other horror. But just writing formal APIs its kind of important to be able to say one expects and will send formally a VCF4.2 in UTF-8 encoding and nothing else. Entirely happy to collaborate on this, I've considered doing it several times prior, but just assumed it would get done by someone else. |
Vcard's use of the |
Sure but if an email or website gave the correct MIME content-type header then it would actually trigger the right application. Or at least have a better chance. That there is no universally agreed MIME means that user applications cannot register this in things like Windows. That's the nice part of seeing this done. If you just respond with Worse is it's quite rare someone wants their browser to render a 100MB whole genome VCF (the default for text/subtype), they probably want it as a file. In the wild this has lead to lots of people using naively Perhaps I'm crazy and am the only person who's had these issues, but I somewhat doubt it. It's just very few people especially in one shot academic resources understand what happens outside of their software as the user/consuming experience. But right now even if they did take great care, it's surprisingly hard to provide a good experience with existing web technologies/standards; without some MIME. For example there is no reason to have bam/vcf/whatever specific HTSGet endpoints via format= query strings, it should all be MIME in the headers of your requests and responses. That the spec isn't like this is an endemic issue in the field, where we all choose to subvert established best practices the web has defined for a real long time. |
It would be great to see this happen. You are not alone in wishing there were official media types for these formats. Do you think it would help to start with VCF only, since it has the greatest need to be differentiated from something else? The other formats could be registered later, benefitting from the lessons learned in the VCF registration process. |
@jmarshall I don't suppose there is still any appetite for this? |
There is indeed. This is being tracked as ga4gh/TASC#36 but as usual the limiting factor is someone finding the time to actually do the leg work. |
Hi @jmarshall I seemingly got down the road of doing this. (See The-Sequence-Ontology/SO-Ontologies#646) on a whim, and only just now found this issue. I've attatched IANA Media Type submission templates that I drafted for a variety of plain text formats used in bioinformatics, based off the existing gff3 IANA Media type. https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/gff3 ga4gh/TASC#36 seems to be considering mostly the binary file formats. I.e. My reading of
Thoughts? I already have |
It would be amazing if all of the file types specified here such as VCF v4.2 had a formally defined and registered MIME type with the IANA for use in interchange. HTSGet JSON payloads already have something like
application/vnd.ga4gh.htsget.v1.1.1+json
for example. I am unsure who should be the formal vendor for VCF etc., but given the defacto spec comes from samtools it could either be Genome Research Ltd but really is there a reason to not have GA4GH be the holder of these?I have found this issue frustrating enough over easily the last 10 years I am happy to prepare an application following all the RFCs for someone else to more formally submit. It's worth noting that even the HTSGet MIME doesn't appear to be registered with IANA
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