WARC MIME Media Type

A curious thing came up during the WARC 1.1 review process. In version 1.0, section 8 talked about what MIME media types should be used when exchanging WARCs over the Internet. During the review process, however, it was pointed out that this is actually outside the scope of the standard. 1.1 consequently drops section 8.

For now we should regard the instructions from 1.0 section 8 as best practices. But it isn't part of any official standard.

That's not to say that it isn't important to have a standard set of MIME types for WARC content. Only that the WARC ISO standard isn't the place for it. This is actually something that IANA is responsible for, with specification work going through the IETF if I'm understanding this correctly.

I'm not at all familiar with this process. But it is clear that if we wish to have this standardized then going through this process is the only option. If anyone can offer further insight into how we could move this forward please get in touch.