In Web programming development, MIME type refers to "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions", which is a way to identify and represent the format of documents. Each document can be assigned a specific MIME type, which is used to indicate the content type of the document.
A MIME type usually consists of two parts: a main type and a subtype, separated by a slash (/). A main type represents a broad category of documents, and a subtype represents a specific subtype under that broad category.
Common MIME types include:
- text/plain: indicates a plain text file.
- text/html: Indicates an HTML document.
- text/css: Indicates the CSS style sheet.
- application/json: indicates JSON data.
- application/pdf: indicates a PDF document.
- image/jpeg: Indicates a JPEG image.
- image/png: Indicates a PNG image.
- audio/mpeg: Indicates MP3 audio files.
- video/mp4: Indicates MP4 video files.
When the web browser receives the document sent by the server, it will determine how to process the document according to the MIME type of the document. For example, if the MIME type received by the browser is "text/html", it will be parsed as an HTML document and rendered; if it is "image/jpeg", it will be displayed as a picture.
By correctly setting the MIME type of the document, you can ensure that the browser correctly parses and displays the content of the document, providing a better user experience.