What is a MIME type?

Originally, MIME was “multipurpose internet mail extensions” and was developed to handle email attachments, but was later expanded to encompass a much broader usage. Today, a MIME type instructs the computer how to handle a file, and is defined for each file type in use. For example, the common web MIME type “text/html” is typically configured as .htm or .html (hypertext markup language, or a common web page); the file extension is optional (the server sends the “content-type” information). The browser sees the MIME type and interprets the file content accordingly.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigns and maintains the official list of MIME types in use today. However, a cPanel user can define new MIME types, locally, on an as-needed basis. A common usage of the MIME type is to create a unique web address, such as “index.fc” instead of ‘index.html,” and register that new extension as a MIME type of “text/html.”

MIME types can be video, text, audio, images, or application-specific. Each application can have its own MIME type, an operating system (such as Microsoft® Windows XP) can have its own MIME types, and your web host has its own MIME types.

MIME types have a type/subtype description; for example, a Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) file would have a MIME type of image/gif, specifying an image type and a GIF subtype.

cPanel provides a simple-to-use interface to manage the MIME types on the domain. You can create a MIME type, remove a user-defined MIME type, view user-defined MIME types, and view system-level MIME types.

Figure: MIME type management screen in cPanel