DaveNet: Tuesday, July 29, 1997; by Dave Winer.

MIME type for CDF

If you're running a web server and are doing a Channel Definition File for the site, you need to know how to configure the server to serve the CDF file. The question is, what MIME type to use? Since Microsoft has taken the lead in promoting CDF, I believe their word on this is definitive.

Question

Jim Roepcke, jroepcke@main.roepcke.com, sent an email:

On my web server, CDF Files are defined as application/x-netcdf.

This came as a bit of a surprise to me, as it was preconfigured that way on my ISP's server, and I wasn't expecting any type. (I guess it makes sense that there is one, though...)

Anyway, you may want to configure your servers for x-netcdf too, if that's what it's supposed to be.

Answer

A response came from Alex Hopmann, alexhop@microsoft.com, who does web software at Microsoft:

Actually for now you should serve CDF as "application/x-cdf"- Internet Explorer will support this forever. We are currently in the process of registering the MIME Type "application/cdf" with the IETF, but that process can take some time.

The .cdf extension used to be used by "netcdf" which was some older unrelated file format.