MIME - Multi Purpose Internet Mail Extension

A MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension. In
the context of internet or web applications the way of identifying files
according to their nature and format. While developing the web applications
specify content-type in the header part of HTTP – response. 

A MIME type is a
mechanism that can be informed to the client the variety of document
transmitted. Extensions of the files has plays a small role in the web. 

General form of MIME is type/subtype. it is the syntax for mime type

Below are few  MIME
types :

• Text/html - for Html files


• multipart/zip - for zip files


• Application/msword - for word documents


• image/jpeg - for JPEG image files

RFC defines messages have two parts one is header and a
body. These header and body represents in ASCII text format. The body of the message
is a simple text originally. RFC has decided how to send information in any
format means file or image or video. SO it was introduced MIME for sending
image type data or any other formatted data.

The message header is a series of <CRLF> terminated lines.
CRLF stands for carriage return line feed which are a pair of ASCII control
characters often used straight forward encoding of binary data into ASCII
character set.  This encoding is called
base64. In this approach every three bytes of data into 4 ascii
characters.  This is done by grouping the
binary data into 24-bit units and breaking each such unit into four 6-bits
pieces. Each 6-bit piece maps onto one of 64 valid ASCII characters;

A MIME message that consists of may be a regular text and
can be encoded using 7-bit ASCII.