The Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) standard is a means of specifying media types such as images, program data, audio files, and text. Described in Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC) documents 2045 through 2049, it includes a comprehensive list of known types and has inspired a registry for many more. MIME was developed originally to extend the paradigm of email from plain text to a rich array of media. Email transport systems, such as the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), can only deal with 7-bit ASCII text. You cannot simply append a binary file to the end of a message and have it bounce happily across the Internet. The data has to be encoded in an ASCII-compatible way. There are other requirements as well, such as a minimum line length and absence of certain control characters . MIME introduces methods to transform data into a safe form. It also describes how to package this data in a recognizable way for mail transfer agents and clients to work with. One of the ways MIME describes a resource is by assigning it a media type (or content-type ) which names the general category that best describes the data. Each type includes a set of subtypes that exactly identify the resource. The type and subtype are usually written together, joined by a slash character (/). For example, image/jpeg denotes a graphical resource in the JPEG format. The major types include:
You can see that MIME tackles a huge problem in attempting to label every conceivable kind of data that could be transmitted over a network. It works well because of a well-publicized registry of media types maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). You can see the latest list at http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/index.html. MIME content types are important in many areas outside of email. General-purpose MIME dispatchers analyze a document as it appears and routes it to the correct media handler. For example, web browsers rely on HTTP headers to tell them what kind of data is arriving. The following HTTP content type field tells us that the incoming resource is text and should be handled as HTML: Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 The charset portion is optional and actually means "character encoding" (another case of confusing terms). This is another mechanism, besides XML declarations, for specifying a character encoding. In XML, too, there are cases in which MIME is useful. For example, in linking with XPointers, it would be helpful to the XML processor to know in advance what resource is being imported. Another example is specifying a stylesheet in a document: <?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="ex2_memo.css"?> Here, the type attribute is set to a MIME content type for CSS stylesheets. As XML rises in prominence as an exchange medium on the Internet, the need for media types that identify XML-related data grows. A recent specification, RFC 3023, adds a few new XML- related media types to the mix and a way to extend other media types to include a "+xml" suffix. For example, you can make the type image/svg more descriptive by adding the tag to make it image/svg+xml . A system that recognizes and treats XML data specially will benefit from that extra information. The new media types are:
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