MIME TYPES: An Internet Standard Type   MIME is an acronym for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. MIME types are employed by numerous Internet protocols, like e-mail and HTTP to indicate the nature of data which is transported or contained in a file by the filename extension used. MIME types include many variants of text, audio, image, and video data.  Basically, MIME types tell your browser how to handle files. Incidentally, the gopher protocol did not support MIME.  A particular MIME type is a pair of elements delimited by a slash ("/").MIME types have the syntax type/subtype. Either type or subtype may be ‘*’ to mean ``any. By default all MIME types are allowed (*/*).  Underneath are some complete MIME types examples. You have probably seen these sorts of things while configuring your WWW browser for helper applications:      * Application/msword     * Application/zip     * Application/x-tar     * Audio/basic     * Audio/x-wav     * Text/html     * Text/plain     * Image/gif     * Image/jpeg     * Video/mpeg     * Video/quicktime  To describe the MIME type, you can type up to 512 characters, each for type and subtype.  Whenever your browser receives the file of type text/html (the most common WWW MIME type), application reads the MIME type and determines how to handle the object. Then your browser interprets the incoming data as HTML and displays it.  MIME types are important because you have to know what kinds of data you are serving to your constituents. All WWW server applications come configured to handle most MIME types.  If you necessitate constructing a MIME type which is not a standard MIME type, then you can outline it using the naming convention: content type/x-subtype, where subtype is the user-specific subtype. For example, WAV files are not judged as a standard MIME type, so the MIME type name looks like this: audio/x-wav.  Note: If you define a MIME type that is considered a standard MIME type, and you use x-, the application you use, might not recognize the document.  You can delete any custom MIME types at any time. However, you can not delete system-wide MIME types.  Make sure, you check the list of pre-existing MIME types before adding new ones. Check with your hosting administrator before adding a MIME type, as they can easily alter the correct functioning of your web site.   (Posted By Simon on Friday, January 06, 2006)  Read All Stories