Type | Subtype | Description |
text |
| The document represents printable text. |
| calendar | Calendaring and scheduling information in the iCalendar format; see RFC 2445. |
| css | A Cascading Style Sheet used for HTML and XML. |
| directory | Address book information such as name, phone number, and email address; used by Netscape vCards; defined in RFCs 2425 and 2426. |
| enriched | A very simple HTML-like language for adding basic font and paragraph-level formatting such as bold and italic to email; used by Eudora; defined in RFC 1896. |
| html | Hypertext Markup Language as used by web browsers. |
| plain | This is supposed to imply raw ASCII text. However, some web servers use text/plain as the default MIME type for any file they can't recognize. Therefore, anything and everything, most notably .class byte code files, can get identified as a text/plain file. |
| richtext | An HTML-like markup for encoding formatting into pure ASCII text. It's never really caught on, in large part because of the popularity of HTML. |
| rtf | An incompletely defined Microsoft format for word processing files. |
| sgml | The Standard Generalized Markup Language; ISO standard 8879:1986. |
| tab-separated-values | The interchange format used by many spreadsheets and databases; records are separated by linebreaks and fields by tabs. |
| xml | The W3C standard Extensible Markup Language. For various technical reasons, application/xml should be used instead, but often isn't. |
multipart |
| Multipart MIME messages encode several different files into one message. |
| mixed | Several message parts intended for sequential viewing. |
| alternative | The same message in multiple formats so a client may choose the most convenient one. |
| digest | A popular format for merging many email messages into a single digest; used by many mailing lists and some FAQ lists. |
| parallel | Several parts intended for simultaneous viewing. |
| byteranges | Several separately contiguous byte ranges; used in HTTP 1.1. |
| encrypted | One part for the body of the message and one part for the information necessary to decode the message. |
| signed | One part for the body of the message and one part for the digital signature. |
| related | Compound documents formed by aggregating several smaller parts. |
| form-data | Form responses. |
message |
| An email message. |
| external-body | Just the headers of the email message; the message's body is not included but exists at some other location and is referenced, perhaps by a URL. |
| http | An HTTP 1.1 request from a web client to a web server. |
| news | A news article. |
| partial | Part of a longer email message that has been split into multiple parts to allow transmission through email gateways. |
| rfc822 | A standard email message including headers. |
image |
| Two-dimensional pictures. |
| cgm | A Computer Graphics Metafile format image. CGM is ISO standard 8632:1992 for device-independent vector graphics and bitmap images. |
| g3fax | The standard for bitmapped fax images. |
| gif | A Graphics Interchange Format image. |
| jpeg | The Joint Photographic Experts Group file format for bitmapped images with lossy compression. |
| png | A Portable Network Graphics Format image. The format was developed at the W3C as a modern replacement for GIF that supports 24-bit color and is not encumbered by patents. |
| tiff | The Tagged Image File format from Adobe. |
audio |
| Sound. |
| basic | 8-bit ISDN -law encoded audio with a single channel and a sample rate of eight kilohertz. This is the format used by .au and .snd files and supported by the java.applet.AudioClip class. |
video |
| Video. |
| mpeg | The Motion Picture Experts Group format for video data with lossy compression. |
| quicktime | Apple's proprietary QuickTime movie format. Before being included in a MIME message, QuickTime files must be "flattened". |
model |
| 3-D images. |
| vrml | A Virtual Reality Modeling Language file, a format for 3-D data on the Web. |
| iges | The Initial Graphics Exchange Specification for interchanging documents between different CAD programs. |
| mesh | The mesh structures used in finite element and finite difference methods. |
application |
| Binary data specific to some application. |
| octet-stream | Unspecified binary data, which is usually saved into a file for the user. This MIME type is sometimes used to serve .class byte code files. |
| java | A nonstandard subtype sometimes used to serve .class byte code files. |
| postscript | Adobe PostScript. |
| dca-rft | IBM's Document Content Architecture-Richly Formatted Text. |
| mac-BinHex40 | A means of encoding the two forks of a Macintosh document in a single ASCII file. |
| | An Adobe Acrobat file. |
| zip | A zip compressed file. |
| macwriteii | A MacWrite II word-processing document. |
| msword | A Microsoft Word document. |
| xml+xhtml | An XHTML document |
| xml | An Extensible Markup Language document. |