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I don't see that the "stripped" or "single file" response necessitates incomplete coverage metadata. It depends on how well (and complete) a particular coverage format encoding document maps the coverage metadata into that format. Which of course, also depends on the capabilities of that format for capturing all the coverage metadata.
exactly, it depends on the format's capabilities where mileage varies greatly (think of PNG...).
A complete mapping may not be an easy goal for many formats. But it seems an important goal for the format encoding documents to map as completely as possible both the payload and the metadata into the target format in a way that is natural to that format. Having the metadata fit naturally into a format means that the tools that already deal with that format will have an easier time accessing (and hopefully understanding) the metadata.
I'm completely in line with you: any WCS output should contain metadata to the maximum extent possible in the resp. format. For this heterogeneity I would always prefer some manifest - as we call it - with the complete set & in a standard encoding (XML). But I realize that some users want to have the pure encoding, hence, they have to live in this case with any incompleteness occurring. -Peter
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