What is a MIME Type?

General Support
MIME stands for "Multimedia Internet Mail Extensions" and are used by web servers to "tell" browsers how to process or manage a file with a certain extension which should containing certain types of data or information.

Common MIME types such as the extension .htm are well know and it is widely understood that a file with this extension is an HTML page containing HTML markup.

When a browsers requests a file from a web servers, the web server views the extension of that file (for example .htm or .html) to determine how to deal with that file.  It then provides this information to the visiting browser in the form of a "Content-type: header" so the browser can display the file type correctly.  If the server is not aware of a particular file extension and doesn't know how to deal with that type of file , this can cause an error message to be displayed on the users browser and can sometimes cause an error on the server.

Here are some examples of common MIME types seen on the web:

 MIME Type File Extension  Function 
 text/html  .htm   Web Page
 image/png  .png  PNG Image
 text/html  .html  Web Page
 audio/mpeg  .mp3  MPEG Audio 

MIME Types can be managed from within the Control Panel for each domain by clicking on the "MIME Types" icon from the Domain Menu. 
Article ID: 45, , Modified: April 1, 2014 at 1:16 AM

Share this article

FacebookGoogle+TwitterOther Social NetworksPrint