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MIME Type ○꠹｜Definition｜1st｜20260122122521-00-⌔

Media type - Wikipedia

Media type

In information and communications technology, a media type,12 content type23 or MIME type145 is a two-part identifier for file formats and content formats. Their purpose is comparable to filename extensions and uniform type identifiers, in that they identify the intended data format. They are mainly used by technologies underpinning the Internet, and also used on Linux desktop systems.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the official authority for the standardization and publication of these classifications. Media types were originally defined in Request for Comments RFC 2045 (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies (Nov 1996) in November 1996 as a part of the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) specification, for denoting type of email message content and attachments;6 hence the original name, MIME type. Media types are also used by other internet protocols such as HTTP,7 document file formats such as HTML,8 and the XDG specifications implemented by Linux desktop environments,5 for similar purposes.

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. “Media Types”. IANA. IANA. 4 June 2018. Retrieved 5 June 2018. [RFC2046] specifies that Media Types (formerly known as MIME types) and Media Subtypes will be assigned and listed by the IANA. ↩ ↩2

  2. Fielding, R.; Nottingham, M.; Reschke, J. (2022). “Media Type”. HTTP Semantics. IETF. sec. 8.3.1. doi:10.17487/rfc9110. ISSN 2070-1721. STD 97. RFC 9110. HTTP uses media types [RFC2046] in the Content-Type (Section 8.3) and Accept (Section 12.5.1) header fields in order to provide open and extensible data typing and type negotiation. ↩ ↩2

  3. “4.3. Attribute Types”. XHTML Modularization 1.1 - Second Edition. W3C. 2010-07-29. ContentType: A media type, as per [RFC2045]. ↩

  4. Hemsley, Gordon P. “4.1. MIME type representation”. MIME Sniffing Standard. WHATWG. Standards are encouraged to consistently use the term MIME type to avoid confusion with the use of media type as described in Media Queries. ↩

  5. “shared-mime-info-spec”. freedesktop.org. 2023-09-03. ↩ ↩2

  6. Freed, N.; Borenstein, N. (November 1996). “Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies”. Internet Engineering Task Force. Retrieved 15 July 2015. ↩

  7. Nielsen, Henrik; Fielding, Roy T.; Berners-Lee, Tim (May 1996). “Hypertext Transfer Protocol — HTTP/1.0”. Retrieved 2 Feb 2017. ↩

  8. “HTML 4.01 Specification”. 24 Dec 1999. Retrieved 2 Feb 2017. ↩

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