Overview [1]#

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the official authority for the standardization and publication of these classifications.

Media-type were originally defined in RFC 2045 in November 1996 as a part of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) specification, for denoting type of email message content and attachments hence the name MIME Type.

Media-type are also used by other Internet protocols such as HTTP and document file formats such as HTML, for similar purpose. A media type consists of a type and a subtype, which is further structured into a tree. A media type can optionally define a suffix and parameters:

type "/" [tree "."] subtype ["+" suffix] *[";" parameter]

Media-type, subtypes and suffix should appear in the IANA Registry IANA.MediaTypes

These are the Media-type "type":

• application - Represents any kind of binary data.
• audio - Represents any kind of audio files[2]
• font
• example - The 'example' media type is used for examples. Any subtype following the media type syntax may be used in those examples. No subtype can be registered with IANA. For more information see RFC 4735.
• image - Represents any kind of images. Videos are not included, though animated images (like animated gif) are described with an image type.
• message
• model
• multipart - Multipart types indicate a category of document that are broken in distinct parts, often with different MIME Types.
• text - Represents any document that contains text and is theoretically human readable with the default character set US-ASCII
• video - Represents any kind of video files[2]

More Information#

• Application
• Audio
• Content-Encoding
• Content-Type
• Font
• HTTP Warn Codes
• Image
• MIME Type
• Multipart
• RFC 5967
• RFC 6838
• Structured Syntax Suffix
• Video

• [#1] - MIME types - based on information obtained 2016-08-10
• [#2] - Media formats for HTML audio and video - based on information obtained 2018-07-10-