Register application/vnd.pmtiles with IANA

[brawer]

The PMTiles spec recommends MIME type application/vnd.pmtiles. However, this identifier does not seem to be listed in the IANA registry. Registration of media types is free (and trivial), see this form.

[bdon]

Thanks for the link, what do you foresee as the practical benefits of registering the MIME type now?

[brawer]

The internet doesn’t fall apart when some server returns an undefined content type, but the IANA registry is useful for developers, as it defines the semantics of each content type. If you like, I’ll gladly volunteer to go through the registation process.

[bdon]

@brawer yes, that would be appreciated. Are you OK with putting your contact information in the registration fields? Otherwise I can provide this.

[brawer]

OK, I filed a registration request (IANA ticket 1413440), will keep you posted.

Name: Sascha Brawer

Email: sascha@brawer.ch

Media type name: application

Media subtype name: vnd.pmtiles

Required parameters: N/A

Optional parameters: N/A

Encoding considerations: binary



Security considerations: PMTiles is a container format with internal offsets, stored as binary positions within the same file. Clients must ensure that these offsets are not out of bounds. Clients must also check the integrity of embedded media, such as when decoding satellite image tiles in JPEG or WebP format. Clients that interpret embedded metadata must check the structural validity of the embedded JSON object. No executable content. No privacy/integrity services.

Interoperability considerations: Byte order is little-endian as per format specification. Systems with a different endianness must convert to/from little-endian order when producing/receiving PMTiles.

Published specification: https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/blob/main/spec/v3/spec.md

Applications which use this media: PMTiles is a single-file archive format for geographic data, optimized for HTTP range requests (RFC 9110, section 14). It is supported by geographic software such as GDAL, QGIS, and various web mapping libraries.

Fragment identifier considerations: N/A

Restrictions on usage: N/A

Provisional registration? (standards tree only): No

Additional information:

   1. Deprecated alias names for this type: N/A
   2. Magic number(s): PMTiles files starts with the 7-byte octet sequence 0x50 0x4D 0x54 0x69 0x6C 0x65 0x73 ("PMTiles" in ASCII), followed by a single-octet version indicator such as 0x03 for PMTiles version 3.
   3. File extension(s): .pmtiles
   4. Macintosh file type code: N/A
   5. Object Identifiers: N/A

General Comments:

Person to contact for further information:

   1. Name: Sascha Brawer
   2. Email: sascha@brawer.ch

Intended usage: COMMON

Author/Change controller: Author of PMTiles format specification: Brandon Liu <brandon@protomaps.com>

[brawer]

Mail from IANA:

Hi Sascha,

I've assigned this to an expert (Alexey Melnikov) and sent it on to the media-types@ietf.org list, which doesn't always chime in on these. I'll also send you any notes/questions that come from Alexey, who should incorporate any input from the list that he believes should be passed on, and/or expert Darrel Miller.

thanks,
Amanda