I wrote a post about chemical MIME (
http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=2712 ) and there has been
feedback about problems that it causes in some instances. Some of the
comments have been on an earlier post:
http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=2695. The issue is relavely
simple, the solution is probably not. It requires community input so I'm
raising it on the BO... I am agnostic about the solution, but it's important
there is rough consensus.
Simply, the chemical MIME types were proposed at a time when there seemed to
be a good chance that they would be accepted as toplevel types, and during
the discussion period the whole Web (1995) adopted them in the form
chemical/x-pdb, etc. A large number of chemical filetypes have been proposed
and published on http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/chemime/ and as far as I am aware
none has been refused. If someone wants a chemical MIME type they ask Henry
and it gets added.
The advantage of chemical MIME is that various agents (browsers, etc.) know
the stated chemical type offered by a server. In addition it allows software
to process files by their type. Unlike suffixes which are awfully fragile,
chemical MIME allows unique identification of file types.
Unfortunately for us and the community the IETF did not accept the chemical/
toplevel type and - unless anyone has other evidence - are most unlikely to
accede to a repeat request. There was great discussion at the time and if
you can find the r=archives its probably worth looking at. As a result files
are labelled with an unauthorised toplevel MIME type chemical/
This works well in the chemical community but certain software appears to
check MIME types against the IETF/IANA list and throws errors on chemical/
The issue has concerned some of the OS community as reported by Nina:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2005-May/005244.html
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=420795
I (PMR) have suggested several courses of action:
What to do? I really don’t know. I can think of the following:
- Go back to the IETF. Chance of success? 0.00000001
- Get the chemical world to change to another MIME type (it’s possible
that “x-chemical/pdb” would be allowed. But it might not). It would destroy
hundreds of millions of working documents.
- Synchronize the change with new types alongside old ones and then
deprecate them gradually over a period of years.
- Fix the behaviour of KDE. Chance of success 0.00001
- Ignore the problem
- Try some awful kludgy workaround
I'd like to have some idea of
* which systems rely on Chemical/MIME
* what would happen if it was removed from them.
and conversely
* what breaks witrh the non-compliant chemical MIME and
* how widespread are the systems that break
* what are the consequences
* are there workarounds?
--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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