MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions and was originally used to describe the type of content that is contained in an email. This is still necessary because the basic email message is only allowed to contain text, and primarily English language text. Of course we all know that email can contain a lot more than text these days, and that is due to the addition of MIME to the official standard describing email content.

In fact, MIME types have become useful beyond email. MIME types are also used to decribe the type of content being delivered in web pages. This allows the delivery of images, sounds, PDF documents, programs and other non-text content. Luckily MIME is not something that we normally need to worry about. As a user of email and web pages the MIME content is transparently encoded and decoded for you (if everything goes right).

Some examples of MIME types are:
* text/html for normal web pages
* text/plain for plain text
* application/octet-stream meaning "download this file"
* application/x-java-applet for Java applets
* application/pdf for PDF documents.