The name is not decided#

Date of the discussion: 2026-08-28. Still open on 2026-09-01.

Freeze item 5 wants the brand out of the wire, which means picking a string that gets frozen into every file: tag prefix, format id, media type, schema URL, spec title. It is the one decision on the freeze list that genuinely cannot be revised later.

The real question is narrower than "pick a name". It is product name, or its own name, and the name falls out of that.

CASSINI#

Zero wire migration, zero alias table, the files already say it. SQLite's file format is named after the one product that writes it and became a Library of Congress-recommended archival format anyway.

The env-var collision (item 5: CASSINI_ doubles as a config prefix in ~170 places) even inverts here: instead of renaming nine wire strings you rename ~170 deployment env vars, which is local config rather than bytes on disk.

Cost: a spec named after one vendor's product reads as that vendor's private format. That matters only if third-party producers are actually wanted. "The format should have its own identity, Cassini just one user of it" was the opening framing of the whole exercise, so this is really a question of whether that goal has softened.

Cairn#

The pick given the independent-identity premise: a marker left in a durable medium so whoever comes next can read it, which is the format's function. Pronounceable, and nothing in format space uses it. Used throughout the public page draft as the working name.

Weakness: it tells you nothing about what the file contains.

CAWT#

Argued against, and not because it's an acronym (PDF, PNG and FLAC are acronyms and did fine). It sits between the two stools: you pay the full rename cost, but the C still stands for Cassini, so you don't buy the neutrality the rename was for. If the brand tie stays, plain CASSINI is strictly better — one name instead of two.

One rescue if the word itself appeals: it is a homophone of "caught", which is apt for a recording format, and acronyms can be re-expanded. "Container for Audio With Transcript" keeps CAWT and drops the product from the expansion. Then it is a real contender.

What this repository does meanwhile#

Everything here still uses the shipped CASSINI_ / org.cassini.portable-meeting/N wire strings, because those are what real files contain. The public page draft (public-page-draft-2026-08-28.md) is written in CAIRN_ because it was drafted as the future public site. Nothing has been renamed in a file yet.