[iaufwg] convention or standard

[Preben Grosbol]

On Monday 09 October 2006 18:14, Lucio Chiappetti wrote:
> I believe (as I just said on FITSBITS) that there are two more sources of
> confusion in the present discussion : ...
I share most of Lucio's views (and those of previous contributes) and would
summarize them as:
 1) The (XTENSION='FOREIGN') issue should not be treated as a convention
     but as a 'local' FITS extension like XTENSION='A3DTABLE'.  The transport
     of foreign bit-streams is an issue and should be considered.  The 'DUMP'
     extension was reserved partly for such things (e.g. raw data acquisition
     dumps) but never specified.  There are aspects in the 'FOREIGN' extension
     which should be reconsidered if one would try to move it towards a
     standard (with another name) such as handling of privileges and
     description of the format of the bit-stream.

 2) Conventions are there to document semantic (e.g. of keywords) used
     by a limited community - not for defining local extensions.  One may 
     argue that we should have similar rules for extensions as we now have
     for conventions.

 3) It would be nice if the reference to FITS extensions on the FITS Home
     page would be on the first page (like FITS conventions) and not under
     Documentation.

Cheers, Preben