Hi, I was under the impression that chemistry/* was long ago (1998) proposed and registered by Peter Murray-Rust and Henry Rzepa. "The Application of Chemical Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (Chemical MIME) Internet Standards to Electronic Mail and World Wide Web Information Exchange" https://doi.org/10.1021/ci9803233 Their initial MIME table is at: https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/jcics/
Some of these types (e.g. VMD) are perhaps application-specific. But there are a large number of interchange formats in chemistry used by many formats, and I believe are still in widespread use (including clipboard types): .mol / .sdf chemical/x-mdl-molfile .cif chemical/x-cif .xyz chemical/x-xyz .pdb chemical/x-pdb .cml chemical/x-cml .fch / .fchk chemical/x-formatted-checkpoint .cub / .cube chemical/x-cube .jdx chemical/x-jcamp-dx .spc chemical/x-galactic-spc .smi / .smiles chemical/x-smiles I can think of probably another 5-10 interchange formats that weren’t on that list in 1998 (.mol2 comes to mind) that don’t seem like a good for for application/* because they’re not application-specific. Anyway, if chemical/* hasn’t officially been registered(!?) it’s news to me and I’m sure Peter and Henry among others can help. Best regards, -Geoff --- Prof. Geoffrey Hutchison (he/him) Department of Chemistry University of Pittsburgh tel: (412) 648-0492 email: [email protected] web: https://hutchisonlab.org/ On Sep 4, 2025 at 5:04:11 AM, Drew Parsons <[email protected]> wrote: > It's a good question. > Good idea to keep the media types up to date. > > One of the applications using the chemical media types could be Avogadro > (and openbabel). > I'm cc:ing the developer, Geoff Hutchison, who may have some thoughts > and opinions on the question. > > Geoff: this question has been raised on the Debian Science mailing list, > https://lists.debian.org/debian-science/. Andrius Merkys made a reply > in-thread, https://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2025/09/msg00001.html > > Drew Parsons > > > On 2025-09-03 15:12, Charles Plessy wrote: > > Hi all, > > > I am preparing the next update of the `media-types` package, which > > provides the `/etc/mime.types` file. > > > We have been listing chemical media types in this file since 2003. > > This > > left a lot of time for software and their file formats to be > > progressively replaced. For instance, in my understanding, the `.chm` > > (chemical/x-chemdraw) extension used to be used by ChemDraw, but was > > then taken over by Windows and now ChemDraw uses a different format, > > `.cdxml` (application/vnd.chemdraw+xml). > > > A bunch of chemical media types are problematic because they declare > > file extensions that are taken by other media types, and many software > > parsing `/etc/mime.types` have difficulty to handle this. One way they > > solve the problem, for instance, is to ignore some or all chemical > > media > > types. > > > It is my goal to progresively make `/etc/mime.types` closer and closer > > to the data available at > > https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml, > > including by registering missing types > > (https://www.iana.org/form/media-types) > > and by removing legacy extra types that lost relevance. > > > If the chemical top-level media type is still relevant, maybe some > > people on this list would like to register it to the IANA? A recent > > RFC > > was written about how to do such registration, and it mentions > > awareness > > of the type (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9694.html). > > > If the chemical media type is not relevant anymore, I would like to > > remove it. > > > What are your thoughts? > > > Have a nice day, > > > Charles > >
