2008.07.02 17:32 "[Tiff] BigTiff Support", by alexander johnson

2008.07.10 21:50 "Re: [Tiff] eta for bigtiff support?", by Gary McGath

Joris Van Damme (AWare Systems) wrote:

Frank, all,

Frank wrote:

The specification is not in flux - however, clearly some of the documentation and web site materials have not been kept up to date and are off-putting to adoption.

Joris - can you address some of this?

On the BigTIFF page, second paragraph, I changed 'ongoing attempt to design' to 'ongoing attempt to launch'. The actual off-putting 'word of warning' paragraph about the proposal being just a first proposal, I changed completely, partially reusing Bob's recent wording of the BigTIFF status which I though was very fine and to the point.

Any suggestion for further improvement is appreciated. I'll be leaving for a very short holiday until some time next week, during which time the mailing list archive will not be updated, but I'll check it out as soon as I get back.

Congratulations to all involved on getting to this stage!

There's still the open issue of the MIME type, which was discussed a while back and then dropped. As I read IETF RFC 3302 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3302.txt), "image/tiff" is defined in terms of TIFF 6.0 conformity, so it would be incorrect to refer to a BigTIFF document as "image/tiff". IANA has also registered a MIME type "image/tiff-fx" for TIFF-FX, defined by RFC 3950, so it would be consistent to shoot for "image/tiff-big". IANA requires "publication by a formal standards body," though, so it would be more realistic to stake out "image/x-tiff-big".

--
Gary McGath
Digital Library Software Engineer

Harvard University Libraries, Office for Information Systems