Canonical RESPONSEFORMAT values to use for different VOTable serializations?

Dubois-Felsmann, Gregory P. gpdf at ipac.caltech.edu
Wed Aug 19 06:45:52 CEST 2026


Dear colleagues,

A since-superseded draft of TAPRegExt 1.1

https://www.ivoa.net/documents/TAPRegExt/20151117/WD-TAPRegExt-1.1-20151117.html

appears to be the only place on ivoa.net where candidates for canonical RESPONSEFORMAT values for requesting specific serializations of VOTable can be found in a document.

    <outputFormat ivo-id="ivo://ivoa.net/std/TAPRegExt#output-votable-binary2">
      <mime>application/x-votable+xml;serialization=binary2</mime>
      <alias>votable/b2</alias>
    </outputFormat>
 [...]
    <outputFormat ivo-id="ivo://ivoa.net/std/TAPRegEXT#output-votable-td">
      <mime>application/x-votable+xml;serialization=tabledata</mime>
      <alias>votable/td</alias>
    </outputFormat>

This example is not in more recent drafts and appears to have been moved to 

https://github.com/ivoa-std/TAPRegExt/blob/0350097178adebbaa32fc9873c796df41839cbb3/sample.xml#L429-L439

    <outputFormat ivo-id="ivo://ivoa.net/std/TAPRegExt#output-votable-binary2">
      <mime>application/x-votable+xml;serialization=BINARY2</mime>
      <alias>votable/b2</alias>
      <alias>votableb2</alias>
    </outputFormat>
    <outputFormat ivo-id="ivo://ivoa.net/std/TAPRegExt#output-votable-td">
      <mime>application/x-votable+xml;serialization=TABLEDATA</mime>
      <alias>text/xml</alias>
      <alias>votable/td</alias>
      <alias>votabletd</alias>
    </outputFormat>

with changed capitalization and additional aliases (without the "/"s).  That's probably not canonical yet either because a release hasn't been cut from that repo yet. 

Am I missing something somewhere else about this issue?

For new implementers, does it seem like a reasonably safe bet to go with the current sample.xml values?

Many thanks,
Gregory


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