What exactly is a MIME type [closed]

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I've researched but all I can find is that the manifest file should have the correct MIME type & that's text/cache-manifest. I have no idea what a MIME type is.

Answer 1

As stated in WikiPedia:

An Internet media type is a standard identifier used on the Internet to indicate the type of data that a file contains. Common uses include the following:

email clients use them to identify attachment files, web browsers use them to determine how to display or output files that are not in HTML format, search engines use them to classify data files on the web.

A media type is composed of a type, a subtype, and zero or more optional parameters. As an example, an HTML file might be designated text/html; charset=UTF-8. In this example text is the type, html is the subtype, and charset=UTF-8 is an optional parameter indicating the character encoding.

IANA manages the official registry of media types.

The identifiers were originally defined in RFC 2046, and were called MIME types because they referred to the non-ASCII parts of email messages that were composed using the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) specification. They are also sometimes referred to as Content-types.

Their use has expanded from email sent through SMTP, to other protocols such as HTTP, RTP and SIP.

Answer 2

MIME types have this name because of their original purpose. According to Wikipedia:

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of email to support: Text in character sets other than ASCII, Non-text attachments, Message bodies with multiple parts, Header information in non-ASCII character sets.

Although MIME was designed mainly for SMTP protocol, its use today has grown beyond describing the content of email and now often includes describe content type in general, including for the web (see Internet media type) and as a storage for rich content in some commercial products (e.g., IBM Lotus Domino and IBM Lotus Quickr).

Virtually all human-writt"en Internet email and a fairly large proportion of automated email is transmitted via SMTP in MIME format. Internet email is so closely associated with the SMTP and MIME standards that it is sometimes called SMTP/MIME email.[1] The content types defined by MIME standards are also of importance outside of email, such as in communication protocols like HTTP for the World Wide Web. HTTP requires that data be transmitted in the context of email-like messages, although the data most often is not actually email.