Media Types

What are media types?

Originally, media types were introduced for email messaging.

• Ned Freed, Nathaniel S. Borenstein, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Two: Media Types, RFC 2046, November 1996. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2046

Media types were used as values for the Content-Type MIME header and were called MIME types.

Components of media types

top-level type

Both top-level type and subtype names are case-insensitive.

application:

• Types for discrete data that do not fit under any of the other type names, and particularly for data to be processed by some type of application program.
• audio
• font
• image
• message, multipart:
  • Composite types; that is, they provide a means of encapsulating zero or more objects, each one a separate media type.
• model:
  • Electronically exchangeable behavioral or physical representations within a given domain (for example, 3D models).
• text:
  • Many subtypes of text define a charset parameter.
• video

Subtype

Each subtype is registered into a specific registration tree.

• The name of the subtype carries information about the tree it belongs to.
  • Subtype names that begin with a tree. prefix belong to that tree.

structured syntax suffix

The remaining part of the subtype name after the '+' character (if present).