About MIME Types

What are MIME Types?

A MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) type is an internationally defined data format. These types (and subtypes) are allocated by the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) and a fuller description is given below. These values are used by the Dimensions web client to determine how to display a request or item's content within the user's Internet browser. If you do not intend to use Dimensions web client, you may leave this field blank, in which case a default MIME type will be used, but in anticipation of future developments, it is recommended that you make a relevant choice.

MIME types comprise several broad categories, with each category also having subtypes (see About the MIME Subtypes for full details) defined by using a separator. Common examples of MIME types are "text/plain", "text/html", "application/msword" and "application/pdf".

The broad categories are:

text	Used to describe text of various types
multipart	Indicates that the file contains multiple sections with potentially more than one MIME type
message	Used for various types of messages.
application	A catchall description allowing for miscellaneous types of files
image	Used for graphic files
audio	Used for audio files
video	Used for video files
model	Multi-media modeling

To find out current IANA media types, visit the web site

http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/