correct MIME type for hOCR?

[jronallo]

I'm publishing some hOCR, but uncertain what MIME type to give. I'm using text/html but that seems incomplete. Is there a standard way to convey that a file is hOCR?

[kba]

There is no standard MIME type since hOCR could be a subset of HTML or XHTML (see #1, #2), the specs are not clear here.

I've used text/vnd.hocr+html for internal projects, for me this best conveys the nature of the document but browsers won't display a page served with that. Since most hOCR is XHTML and hence XML, a media type with +xml suffix, e.g. text/[vnd.]hocr+xml could make sense.

For most use cases, I do not see the need for a specific media type, unless you have multiple representations in HTML for a document. Hence, text/html is probably the best solution, it gracefully degrades in a browser and hocr-compliant agents will need to parse the metadata for capabilities anyway.

I'm open for suggestions, particularly if you have a use case for a non-HTML media type.

[jronallo]

In my case this is for use within a JSON-LD manifest where I want to link out to the hOCR and indicate to a client that this page image has an alternate resource which is specifically in hOCR format. It isn't enough to just say it is text/html because it isn't specific enough to tell what the resource is without looking for the .hocr extension on a filename, looking in a label, or actually downloading and inspecting the document.

I think text/vnd.hocr+html is the best suggestion for my case as I'm not concerned with how the web server delivers it or how the client displays it--just that this text over there is specifically hOCR. Thank you.

[kba]

I'm reopening lest I forget it.