mime-type for ABCD-A

[jhpoelen]

Hi!

Is there an official mimetype for ABCD archives?

Something like "application/abcda" ?

Would be great to have a way to describe the format similar to a https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_HTTP/MIME_types/Complete_list_of_MIME_types way.

Thanks!

[DavidFichtmueller]

That is an interesting idea. As far as I am aware, this was never discussed so far. I will take this and discuss it with the other people involved in ABCD and maybe we can come to a suggestion. From the top of my head, I would agree with @ansell from your similar ticket in tdwg/dwc#195 that we should use the +zip convention. With regard to the upcoming version 3.0 of ABCD and the support for other ways of expressing ABCD besides XML, I would suggest to use application/abcd-xml+zip for the archives and application/abcd-xml for the regular ABCD XML files.
While we have some leverage on whether certain products implement this, e.g. the BioCASe Provider Software, for most existing software that supports ABCD it will be merely a suggestion and most of the ABCD will always be delivered without these mimetypes. The other problem I see is that the format is not evident from the file extension. So any software that will handle the files needs to know what is in the files. For instance if you have the same dataset as and ABCD-Archive and DwC-Archive both files end with .zip (most likely). So if they are delivered via a content-agnostic server, it is not possible to send a mime-type other than application/zip.
Anyway, thanks for the suggestion. We will look into it and maybe this will turn into an implementation suggestion for software that handles ABCD.