Hi,
I am looking into http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOS-4615 out
of a report that some WMS 1.1 client cannot handle GS geotiff
output because the content type does not correspond 1-1 to the
value declared in the request and found this in the spec:
------------------------------------------
The return value of a valid Service request shall correspond to the
type requested in the
FORMAT parameter. In an HTTP environment, the Content-type header of
the response
shall be exactly the MIME type given in the request.
------------------------------------------
Now... the spec is overall a bit retarded on this. One can have output
formats that do not have an official mime type or have variants around,
they should have allowed to associate a descriptive name with a standard
mime type in the capabilities document, something like
<Format mime="image/tiff">geotiff</Format>
but I guess we're way too late for that.
Anyways, I see that the WMS 1.3 capabilities output lists only mime types
instead. Nice, but doing so it shaves off a few formats as well, there is
no more a distinction between geotiff and tiff, nor there is a distinction
between png and png8, tiff and tiff8, geotiff and geotiff8.
This is not just cutting away handy aliases, it's cutting away functionality.
I guess the only way to handle this is starting to be creative about mime types?
image/png; mode=8bit
image/tiff; mode=8bit
image/geotiff
image/geotiff; mode=8bit
and then roll out in the capabilites new output formats with that mime as the
output?
Opinions?
Cheers
Andrea
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Ing. Andrea Aime
GeoSolutions S.A.S.
Tech lead
Via Poggio alle Viti 1187
55054 Massarosa (LU)
Italy
phone: +39 0584 962313
fax: +39 0584 962313
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