MIME Media Types

Share this post!

Vote this!

MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) media types were originally devised so that e-mails could include information other than plain text. MIME media types indicate the following things:

• How the parts of a message, such as text and attachments, are combined into the message.
• The way in which each part of the message is specified.
• The way the items are encoded for transmission so that even software that was designed to work only with ASCII text can process the message.

MIME types are not just for use with e-mail; they were adopted by Web servers as a way to tell Web browsers what type of material was being sent to them so that they could cope with that kind of file correctly.  more...