Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions

MIME attachments are defined in RFC 1521 of the Network Working Group. This RFC specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community...

STD 11, RFC 822 defines a message representation protocol which specifies considerable detail about message headers, but which leaves the message content, or message body, as flat ASCII text. This document redefines the format of message bodies to allow multi-part textual and non-textual message bodies to be represented and exchanged without loss of information. This is based on earlier work documented in RFC 934 and STD 11, RFC 1049, but extends and revises that work. Because RFC 822 said so little about message bodies, this document is largely orthogonal to (rather than a revision of) RFC 822.

In particular, this document is designed to provide facilities to include multiple objects in a single message, to represent body text in character sets other than US-ASCII, to represent formatted multi- font text messages, to represent non-textual material such as images and audio fragments, and generally to facilitate later extensions defining new types of Internet mail for use by cooperating mail agents.

Blah, blah, blah,...

Question:What does this mean to an information provider on the Web?

Answer:The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) used on the Web to communicate between clients and servers, leverages off a pre-existing method of attaching non-ASCII documents to an Internet "message."

Question:Why should I care? I've used Netscape for weeks now and have never even come across the "MIME types" term.

Answer:You may not care. Even as an information developer, you may never have to deal with MIME types. But, as more people share the Internet resource, more types of data will be exchanged. Web browsers are primarily data retrieval applications. The Web is really one big delivery mechanism. The browsers don't do much interpretation of data outside of the HTML tags and some inline image decompression and display. Therefore, the Web has the ability to deliver any number of new data types.