Understanding MIME Types

MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) is a set of standards that defines, among other things, a way to indicate the content type of a document. Examples of MIME types are text/html and audio/mpeg. The first component of the MIME type is the main category of the content (text, audio, image, video) and the second component is the specific type.

Apache uses MIME types to determine which modules or filters will process certain content, and to add HTTP headers to the response to identify its content type. These headers will be used by the client application to identify and correctly display the contents to the end user.