HTTP Pocket Reference

Media Types

One of the most important functions of headers is to make it possible for the recipient of the data to know what kind of data it is receiving, and thus be able to process it appropriately. If the client didn’t know that the data returned by the server was a GIF image, it wouldn’t know how to render it on the screen. If it didn’t know that some other data was an audio snippet, it wouldn’t know to call up an external helper application. For negotiating different data types, HTTP incorporated Internet Media Types, which look a lot like MIME types but are not exactly MIME types.

The client tells the server which media types it can handle, using the Accept header. The server tries to return information in one of the client’s preferred media types, and declares the type of the data using the Content-type header.

The Accept header is used to specify the client’s preference for media formats, or to tell the server that it can accept unusual document types. If this header is omitted, the server assumes that the client can accept any media type. The Accept header can have three general forms:

Accept: */*
Accept: type/*
Accept: type/subtype
         

Using the first form, */*, indicates that the client can accept an entity-body of any media type. The second form, type/*, communicates that an entity-body of a certain general class is acceptable. A client may issue an Accept: image/* to accept images, where the type of image (GIF, JPEG, or whatever) is not important. The third form indicates ...