MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. MIME types are originally created to be used with email programs but now it is also used by web browsers. It is a standard way of identifying the file types on the Internet. Web servers and browsers have a list of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions types for handling the files with specific extensions.

A Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions type has two parts. They are main type and subtype. The main type is separated from the subtype by a forward slash character(/). The ‘type’ refers to the logical grouping of many Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions types that are closely related to each other. The ‘subtype’ refers the value of specific file type.

Example: application/xml

This Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions type is used for XML documents.