[TAP] VOTable (was: draft 0.42)

[Patrick Dowler]

On Wednesday 29 April 2009 04:20:44 Mark Taylor wrote:
> I do *not* think there is any call for adoption of an encoding type in
> the sense of appendix A.5, partly for the reason Francois quotes
> above about serialization-dependent issues.

Actually, I wasn't either :-) I was just trying to come up with an example 
where encoding and format could both be meaningful. We do not need that 
functionality for TAP.



> On Tue, 28 Apr 2009, Francois Ochsenbein wrote:
> >      I just don't like the 'format' name for this new attribute,
> >      it means something completely different from the 'format' used
> >      in the FITS vocabulary (VOTable is expected to stay compatible
> >      with FITS format). Could it be 'mime' or 'content', or maybe
> >      'ctype' (an analogy with 'utype') ?
>
> I don't think that "mime" is a good choice, as we don't want to restrict
> it to MIME types, although a MIME type could certainly be a sensible
> value of such a parameter.  "encoding" makes some sense, but it's clearly
> causing confusion.  However "ctype", "content" or "content-type"
> sound like good suggestions.

In http the content-type header holds the mimetype, so it is equivalent. In 
FITS ctype is used specifically to mean "coordinate type". Internally I used 
that term (ctype) to describe the type of quantity of the observable (eg the 
pixel values) in a data model and it confuses people as they do not think the 
observable is a coordinate. 

Hmmm.... that leaves "content" as a pretty generic attribute name: 
content="STC-S" would be read as "the content is STC-S" which is ok as long as 
you don't get to pedantic about the meaning of "is" :-)

I'd be fine with "content" if format is out.

-- 

Patrick Dowler
Tel/Tél: (250) 363-0044
Canadian Astronomy Data Centre
National Research Council Canada
5071 West Saanich Road
Victoria, BC V9E 2M7

Centre canadien de donnees astronomiques
Conseil national de recherches Canada
5071, chemin West Saanich
Victoria (C.-B.) V9E 2M7
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.ivoa.net/pipermail/dal/attachments/20090429/a317790d/attachment-0003.html>