ask for a new application message in samp

[Mark Taylor]

Hi Pierre,

I'm replying to this message as de facto SAMP buff and an author/editor
of the SAMP standard, but opinions of other Apps WG members are of
course welcome.

The general approach in agreeing on MTypes is to avoid multiple ways
to communicate the same thing, to avoid the situation where clients
have to support many different serializations to send and receive
the same type of data.  So for instance it's recommended where
possible to stick to table.load.votable when exchanging tables -
though in fact there are clients that use table.load.{fits,cdf,csv} etc.
The documentation of coverage.load.moc.fits for this reason says
"the introduction of alternative MOC load MTypes is not encouraged"
(https://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/SampMTypes#coverage.load.moc.fits)

However in my personal opinion coverage.load.moc.ascii would be a
reasonable addition to the loosely-agreed list of well-known MTypes.
That's partly because an ASCII-serialized MOC is not expected to
be very large, so exchanging it in-line within the SAMP message itself
is feasible; this is different from coverage.load.moc.fits,
which references the MOC by URL.

If you want to pursue this I'd suggest to prototype its use in
at least one sending and one receiving client and if it seems
to work as expected then report back to the Apps WG (e.g. on this list);
if nobody objects I think it could then be added to the list at
https://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/SampMTypes

Mark

On Thu, 21 May 2026, Pierre Le Sidaner via apps wrote:

> To Apps
> 
> as in the registry EPN-TAP use coverage in ascii MOC format, and we want to
> send the coverage to different clients
> The available MType is coverage.load.moc.fits
> Could it be possible to have something like coverage.load.moc.ascii or
> whatever over denomination that correspond to ascii MOC
> 
> Regards
> Pierre
> 
> 

--
Mark Taylor  Astronomical Programmer  Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bristol.ac.uk          https://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/mbt/