MIME types

The MIME type is the mechanism to tell the client the variety of document transmitted: the extension of a file name has no meaning on the web. It is, therefore, important that the server is correctly set up, so that the correct MIME type is transmitted with each document. Browsers often use the MIME-type to determine what default action to do when a resource is fetched.

There are many kinds of documents, so there are many MIME types. In this article, we will list the most important for Web development, but you can find ones for applicable document types in this dedicated article: Complete list of MIME types.

MIME types are not the only way to convey the document type information:

• Name suffixes are sometimes used, especially on Microsoft Windows systems. Not all operating systems consider these suffixes meaningful (especially Linux and Mac OS), and like an external MIME type, there is no guarantee they are correct.
• Magic numbers. The syntax of the different kind of files allows file-type inference by looking at the structure. E.g. each GIF files starts with the 47 49 46 38 hexadecimal value [GIF89] or PNG files with 89 50 4E 47 [.PNG]. Not all types of files have magic numbers, so this is not a 100% reliable system either.

On the Web, only the MIME type is relevant and should be set carefully. Browsers and servers often used heuristics based on suffixes or magic numbers to define the MIME type, to check for coherence, or to find the correct MIME type when only a generic type has been provided.

Syntax

General structure

type/subtype

The structure of a MIME type is very simple; it consists of a type and a subtype, two strings, separated by a '/'. No space is allowed. The type represents the category and can be a discrete or a multipart type. The subtype is specific to each type.

A MIME type is case-insensitive but traditionally is written all in lower case.

Discrete types

text/plain
text/html
image/jpeg
image/png
audio/mpeg
audio/ogg
audio/*
video/mp4
application/octet-stream
…

Discrete types indicate the category of the document, it can be one of the following:

For text documents without specific subtype, text/plain should be used. Similarly, for binary documents without specific or known subtype, application/octet-stream should be used.

Multipart types

multipart/form-data
multipart/byteranges

Multipart types indicate a category of document that are broken in distinct parts, often with different MIME types. It is a way to represent a composite document. With the exception of multipart/form-data, that are used in relation of HTML Forms and POST method, and multipart/byteranges that are used in conjunction with 206 Partial Content status message to send only a subset of a whole document, HTTP doesn't handle multipart documents in a specific way: the message is simply transmitted to the browser (which will likely propose a Save As window, not knowing how to display the document inline.)

Important MIME types for Web developers

application/octet-stream

This is the default value for a binary file. As it really means unknown binary file, browsers usually don't automatically execute it, or even ask if it should be executed. They treat it as if the Content-Disposition header was set with the value attachment and propose a 'Save As' file.

text/plain

This is the default value for textual files. Even if it really means unknown textual file, browsers assume they can display it.

text/css

Any CSS files that have to be interpreted as such in a Web page must be of the text/css files. Often servers do not recognize files with the .css suffix as CSS files, instead they send them with text/plain or application/octet-stream MIME type: in these cases, they won't be recognized as CSS files by most browsers and will be silently ignored. Special attention has to be paid to serve CSS files with the correct type.

text/html

All HTML content should be served with this type. Alternative MIME types for XHTML (like application/xml+html) are mostly useless nowadays (HTML5 unified these formats).

Images types

Only a handful of image types are widely recognized and are considered Web safe, ready for use in a Web page:

There is a discussion to add WebP (image/webp) to this list, but as each new image type will increase the size of a codebase, this may introduce new security problems, so browser vendors are cautious in accepting it.

Other kinds of images can be found in Web documents. For example, many browsers support icon image types for favicons or similar. In particular, ICO images are supported in this context with the image/x-icon MIME type.

Audio and video types

Like images, HTML doesn't define a set of supported types to use with the <audio> and<video> elements, so only a relatively small group of them can be used on the Web. The Media formats supported by the HTML audio and video elements explains both the codecs and container formats which can be used.

The MIME type of such files mostly represent the container formats and the most common ones in a Web context are:

multipart/form-data

The multipart/form-data type can be used when sending the content of a completed HTML Form from the browser to the server. As a multipart document formal, it consists of different parts, delimited by a boundary (a string starting with a double dash '--'). Each part is an entity by itself, with its own HTTP headers, Content-Disposition, and Content-Type for file uploading fields, and the most common (Content-Length is ignored as the boundary line is used as the delimiter).

Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=aBoundaryString
(other headers associated with the multipart document as a whole)
--aBoundaryString
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="myFile"; filename="img.jpg"
Content-Type: image/jpeg
(data)
--aBoundaryString
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="myField"
(data)
--aBoundaryString
(more subparts)
--aBoundaryString--

The following form:

<form action="http://localhost:8000/" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
  <input type="text" name="myTextField">
  <input type="checkbox" name="myCheckBox">Check</input>
  <input type="file" name="myFile">
  <button>Send the file</button>
</form>

will send this message:

POST / HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:8000
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------8721656041911415653955004498
Content-Length: 465
-----------------------------8721656041911415653955004498
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="myTextField"
Test
-----------------------------8721656041911415653955004498
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="myCheckBox"
on
-----------------------------8721656041911415653955004498
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="myFile"; filename="test.txt"
Content-Type: text/plain
Simple file.
-----------------------------8721656041911415653955004498--

multipart/byteranges

The multipart/byteranges MIME type is used in the context of sending partial responses back to the browser. When the 206 Partial Content status code is sent, this MIME type is used to indicate that the document is composed of several parts, one for each of the requested range. Like other multipart types, the Content-Type uses the boundary directive to define the boundary string. Each of the different parts have a Content-Type header with the actual type of the document and a Content-Range with the range they represent.

HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: multipart/byteranges; boundary=3d6b6a416f9b5
Content-Length: 385
--3d6b6a416f9b5
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Range: bytes 100-200/1270
eta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <meta name="vieport" content
--3d6b6a416f9b5
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Range: bytes 300-400/1270
-color: #f0f0f2;
        margin: 0;
        padding: 0;
        font-family: "Open Sans", "Helvetica
--3d6b6a416f9b5--

Importance of setting the correct MIME type

Most web servers send unknown-type resources using the default application/octet-stream MIME type. For security reasons, most browsers do not allow setting a custom default action for such resources, forcing the user to store it to disk to use it. Some commonly seen incorrect server configurations happen with the following file types:

• RAR-encoded files. In this case, the ideal would be to set the true type of the encoded files; this is often not possible (as it may not be known to the server and these files may contain several resources of different types). In this case, configuring the server to send the application/x-rar-compressed MIME type, users will not have defined a useful default action for them.

• Audio and video files. Only resources with the correct MIME Type will be recognized and played in <video> or <audio> elements. Be sure to use the correct type for audio and video.

• Proprietary file types. Pay particular attention when serving a proprietary file type. Avoid using application/octet-stream as special handling will not be possible: most browsers do not allow defining a default behavior (like "Opening in Word") for this generic MIME type.

MIME sniffing

In the absence of a MIME type, or in some other cases where a client believes they are incorrectly set, browsers may conduct MIME sniffing, which is guessing the correct MIME type by looking at the resource. Each browser performs this differently and under different circumstances. There are some security concerns with this practice, as some MIME types represent executable content and others not. Servers can block MIME sniffing by sending the X-Content-Type-Options along the Content-Type.

See also

• Properly configuring server MIME types

• Media formats supported by the HTML audio and video elements