What is a MimeType?

In fact, it is thanks to MIME that users are able to send not only ASCII text by e-mail, but also other types of data - music, pictures, archived documents, etc., etc. As a matter of fact, even the text itself in encodings other than ASCII, as well as the headers containing characters in such encodings, are also transmitted precisely using MIME.

The idea of transferring binary data via text protocols using MIME extensions has proven to be applicable not only to email. In the World Wide Web, MIME is used to determine the type of content by the browser, which allows, for example, to open DOC files immediately using Microsoft Word, and multimedia files using appropriate players. At the same time, the MIME system is extensible, and each developer of any format can add his own MIME type, which will be used to transfer files of this format.

The names of data types in MIME are written as type / subtype. Among the main MIME data types, the following are worth mentioning: