A MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension. In the context of internet or web applications the way of identifying files according to their nature and format. While developing the web applications specify content-type in the header part of HTTP – response.
A MIME type is a mechanism that can be informed to the client the variety of document transmitted. Extensions of the files has plays a small role in the web.
General form of MIME is type/subtype. it is the syntax for mime type
Below are few MIME types :
Text/html – for Html files
multipart/zip – for zip files
Application/msword – for word documents
image/jpeg – for JPEG image files
RFC defines messages have two parts one is header and a body. These header and body represents in ASCII text format. The body of the message is a simple text originally. RFC has decided how to send information in any format means file or image or video. SO it was introduced MIME for sending image type data or any other formatted data.
The message header is a series of terminated lines. CRLF stands for carriage return line feed which are a pair of ASCII control characters often used straight forward encoding of binary data into ASCII character set. This encoding is called base64. In this approach every three bytes of data into 4 ascii characters. This is done by grouping the binary data into 24-bit units and breaking each such unit into four 6-bits pieces. Each 6-bit piece maps onto one of 64 valid ASCII characters;
A MIME message that consists of may be a regular text and can be encoded using 7-bit ASCII.
