MIME
MIME is an open standard for sending multipart, multimedia data through Internet email.[9] The data may be binary, or it may use multiple ASCII and non-ASCII character sets. Although MIME was originally intended for email, it has become a widely used technique to describe a file’s contents so that client software can tell the difference between different kinds of data. For example, a web browser uses MIME to tell whether a file is a GIF image or a printable PostScript file.
MIME supports almost a hundred predefined types of content. Content
types are classified at two levels: a type and a subtype. The type
shows very generally what kind of data is contained: is it a picture,
is it text, is it a movie? The subtype identifies the specific type
of data: GIF image, JPEG image, TIFF image. For example, HTML’s
content type is text/html; the type is
text, and the subtype is html.
The content type for a GIF image is image/gif; the
type is image, and the subtype is
gif. Table 3.2 lists the more
common defined content types. On most systems, a simple text file
maintains a mapping between MIME types and the application used to
process that type of data; on Unix, this file is called
mime.types. The most current list of registered
MIME types is available from ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/media-types.[10]
The data returned by an HTTP 1.0 or 1.1 web server is sent in MIME
format. Most web servers and clients understand at least two MIME
text content types, text/html ...