2010.01.19 18:55 "Re: [Tiff] eta for bigtiff support?", by Toby Thain

On 19-Jan-10, at 11:15 AM, Bob Friesenhahn 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.

I'm very reluctant to weigh in because I know the issue has been discussed at length in the past, but it should be remembered that thousands of applications don't use libtiff.

--Toby

Regardless, I do agree it is a new format.

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