2010.01.15 13:40 "Re: [Tiff] eta for bigtiff support?", by Phil Harvey

2010.01.19 22:50 "Re: [Tiff] eta for bigtiff support?", by Christopher

This was discussed several years ago.

The consensus was: TIFF/TIF and use the same MIME type.

There is no perfect answer to this question, but using TIFF/TIF and the same MIME type does seem to create the fewest hurdles to adoption.

Chris

On 1/19/10 8:15 AM, "Bob Friesenhahn" <bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote:

On 15-Jan-10, at 12:00 PM, tiff-request@lists.maptools.org wrote:

What's wrong with "image/tiff" and "TIF"? GIF doesn't have different MIME types and extensions for its different versions.

This has been debated before, and probably will be debated again, but my opinion is that a new file type is needed.

Technically, according to the TIFF 6 specification, the 0x002a in the TIFF header is a file identifier. So this can not be used as a version number because any file with a different number is not a TIFF file according to the specification.

This is different than GIF, which defined "87a" as a version number in the original specification.

Older GIF readers (such as the gif2tiff that comes with libtiff) are not able to read newer version GIF files.

My feeling is that calling BigTIFF a new format will cause more harm than good. Many existing applications will be able to read BigTIFF files by simply building with a newer version of libtiff. Regardless, I do agree it is a new format.