MIME Types
Look up a MIME type by name or extension — extension, category, and IANA registration status.
Application — generic data and documents
IANA's generic top-level type — most everyday data formats, documents, and binary files (JSON, PDF, ZIP, Office packages) live here.Standard format for structured data exchange — used extensively by web APIs, configuration files, and document storage.
JSON-LD (JSON for Linking Data) — encodes Linked Data structures inside a regular JSON document, widely used for SEO structured data (schema.org).
Human-readable configuration data format — officially registered since 2024 (RFC 9512); heavily used by Docker Compose, GitHub Actions, and Kubernetes manifests.
Generic XML document — the recommended value for most new use cases, between the two registered XML types (see also text/xml).
HTML served as a valid (well-formed) XML document — stricter than text/html, requiring every element to be properly closed.
Adobe's Portable Document Format — preserves layout, fonts, and formatting consistently across devices and systems.
ZIP compressed archive — one of the most widely used and universally recognized compression formats, also the container behind .docx and .epub.
Archive compressed with the gzip algorithm — widely used for HTTP response compression (Content-Encoding) and inside .tar.gz packages from the Unix world.
RAR compressed archive — the type officially registered with IANA since 2019 by RARLAB, the format's creator.
Older convention for RAR archives, used before application/vnd.rar's official registration in 2019 — still common in legacy software.
Archive compressed in the 7-Zip format, known for its high compression ratio — never received a formal IANA registration.
TAR (Tape Archive) file — bundles several files into a single package without necessarily compressing them, usually paired with gzip (.tar.gz).
Archive compressed with the bzip2 algorithm — generally a better compression ratio than gzip, at the cost of more processing time.
Generic binary data with no more specific type declared — the fallback value used when the server doesn't know, or doesn't state, the file's actual format.
Rich Text Format — a document format with basic formatting (bold, font, color), designed to be readable by virtually any word processor.
Binary format of Microsoft Word 97-2003 (.doc) — still officially registered, even though real-world use has shifted to the modern OOXML format (.docx).
Binary format of Microsoft Excel 97-2003 (.xls) — same situation as .doc: registration still valid, real-world use now centered on the modern OOXML format (.xlsx).
Binary format of Microsoft PowerPoint 97-2003 (.ppt) — same situation as .doc/.xls: registration still valid, real-world use now centered on the modern OOXML format (.pptx).
Word document in the modern Office Open XML format (.docx) — a ZIP package containing XML internally, successor to the binary .doc format.
Excel spreadsheet in the modern Office Open XML format (.xlsx) — a ZIP package containing XML internally, successor to the binary .xls format.
PowerPoint presentation in the modern Office Open XML format (.pptx) — a ZIP package containing XML internally, successor to the binary .ppt format.
Historical type for JavaScript files — formally obsoleted by RFC 9239 (2022) in favor of text/javascript, but still widely accepted for compatibility.
WebAssembly binary — code compiled to run in browsers with near-native performance, a complement to (not a replacement for) JavaScript.
Feed in the Atom format — like RSS, distributes content updates (blog posts, news) to feed readers.
Feed in the RSS format — the most popular content-syndication format on the Web, despite never receiving a formal IANA registration.
SOAP protocol message — exchange of XML-structured messages between systems, common in older enterprise integrations.
Web App Manifest — a JSON file describing how a site should behave when installed as an app (name, icons, theme color).
GeoJSON — a format for encoding geographic data (points, lines, polygons) as JSON, officially registered by RFC 7946 (2016).
Older convention for GeoJSON, used before application/geo+json's official registration — never completed a formal registration of its own.
Older convention for WOFF fonts, used before the "font" top-level type existed — now deprecated in favor of font/woff (RFC 8081, 2017).
Older convention for TrueType fonts, used before the "font" top-level type existed — never received a formal registration, now superseded by font/ttf.
eBook in the EPUB format — a ZIP package containing XHTML, CSS, and metadata, the most widely used open format for digital books.
Android app installation package (.apk) — never received a formal IANA registration, despite being universally recognized in the Android ecosystem.
Standard encoding for HTML form data submitted without a file attachment — key=value pairs separated by &, never formally registered with IANA despite being ubiquitous on the Web.
Unix/Linux shell script (.sh) — never received a formal IANA registration.
Metadata file for the BitTorrent protocol (.torrent) — describes the files and trackers of a share, never formally registered.
Audio — sound and music
Audio formats — music, sound effects, voice calls.MP3 audio — the most widespread lossy compressed audio format in the world, near-universal across players and browsers.
Ogg audio container — typically wrapping open codecs like Vorbis or Opus, a royalty-free alternative to MP3.
Uncompressed (or losslessly compressed) WAV audio — the officially IANA-registered value for this format.
Older and still very common convention for WAV audio — never completed a formal registration, even though audio/wav already exists as an official alternative.
Audio in the WebM container — typically Opus or Vorbis, an open format created by the same project behind WebM video.
AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) audio — MP3's successor with better quality at equivalent bitrates, the default audio format for Apple players and video streaming.
FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) audio — compression with zero quality loss, popular among people who prioritize fidelity over file size.
Audio in the Opus codec — designed for real-time voice and music with low latency, used by WhatsApp, Discord, and WebRTC in general.
MIDI file — doesn't contain recorded audio, but musical instructions (notes, instruments, tempo) interpreted by the playback device; no confirmation of a formal IANA registration was found despite widespread use.
Windows Media Audio (WMA) — Microsoft's proprietary format, little used today outside legacy files.
Font — typefaces
Font formats used by the Web and by operating systems.Font in the WOFF (Web Open Font Format) — compressed specifically for use in @font-face on the Web, the official registered type since the "font" top-level type was created in 2017.
Font in the WOFF2 format — WOFF's successor with even better compression, the recommended format for fonts on the Web today.
TrueType font — an outline font format created by Apple and Microsoft in the 1980s, still widely used outside the Web.
OpenType font — TrueType's successor with support for advanced typographic features (ligatures, stylistic variants).
A collection of TrueType/OpenType fonts bundled into a single file (.ttc) — saves space when several fonts share common data (e.g. variations of the same family).
Image — still and animated images
Image formats — photography, icons, vector graphics, animated images.PNG image — lossless compression with transparency (alpha channel) support, the standard for screenshots, icons, and sharp-edged graphics.
JPEG image — lossy compression optimized for photography, the most used image format on the Web for photographic content.
GIF image — limited to a 256-color palette, but with native frame-by-frame animation support, which has kept the format relevant decades after being technically surpassed.
WebP image — Google's modern format with lossy or lossless compression, usually smaller than equivalent PNG/JPEG, with animation and transparency support.
SVG vector image — described in XML, scales to any size without losing sharpness, editable as text/code.
Bitmap image — Windows's uncompressed (or lightly compressed) format, large files in exchange for maximum reading simplicity.
TIFF image — a flexible format used mostly in professional photography and document scanning, supports multiple pages and lossless compression.
AVIF image — based on the AV1 video codec, meaningfully better compression than WebP/JPEG in many cases, with growing support across modern browsers.
HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) image — the default photo capture format on Apple devices since 2017, noticeably better compression than JPEG at equivalent size.
HEIF (High Efficiency Image Format) container — the broader format of which HEIC is a specific variant (an HEVC-encoded image).
JPEG 2000 image — JPEG's technical successor with better compression, limited adoption outside digital archiving and medical/geospatial imaging.
.ico icon — the officially IANA-registered type since 2003, even though Windows itself, in practice, still sends image/x-icon.
Older and, in practice, still more common convention for .ico icons — never completed a formal registration, even though image/vnd.microsoft.icon already exists as an official alternative.
Animated PNG — an extension of the PNG format with frame-by-frame animation and true transparency support, with no formally registered MIME type of its own (technically served as image/png).
Native Adobe Photoshop document (.psd) — preserves layers, masks, and other non-destructive editing features.
Message — messages and email
The structure of a complete message — the format used by email and by certain internal HTTP responses.A complete email message in the format defined by RFC 822/5322 — headers (From, To, Subject) followed by the body, the format behind the .eml file.
Internationalized variant of message/rfc822 — allows headers and email addresses with Unicode characters beyond ASCII (RFC 6532).
An entire HTTP request or response (start line, headers, body) encapsulated as the content of another message — used mostly in debugging and proxy tools.
A fragment of a larger message, split into several parts for transmission — each part carries metadata indicating how to reassemble the whole.
A reference to content that isn't embedded in the message, but accessible externally (via FTP, URL, etc.) — historically used to avoid inflating email size with large attachments.
Model — 3D models
Three-dimensional model formats — meshes, scenes, objects for 3D printing or rendering.glTF 3D model in JSON format — the industry-standard open format for efficient transmission of 3D scenes and models, maintained by the Khronos Group.
glTF 3D model in binary format (.glb) — the same content as glTF JSON, packaged into a single compact binary file.
STL (Stereolithography) 3D model — describes an object's surface as a mesh of triangles, the most common input format for 3D printing.
VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) — a pioneering interactive 3D scene format from the 1990s, largely superseded today by X3D and glTF.
Generic 3D mesh — a polygonal surface representation used by modeling and simulation tools.
Multipart — several parts in one body
A request/message body split into several independent parts — the basis of file upload in an HTML form.A request body split into named parts — the format used by every HTML form that submits a file (upload), letting text and binary fields mix in a single request.
Several parts of different types, with no special relationship between them — the most generic multipart, the historical basis for email attachments.
Several parts representing the same content in different formats — the client picks the best version it can display (e.g. an email with a plain-text version and an HTML version).
Several parts that together form a whole, referencing one another — e.g. an HTML document and the images embedded in it, referenced by an internal identifier.
Several chunks (byte ranges) of the same resource, returned in a single HTTP 206 Partial Content response — used for partial/resumable download of large files.
Content accompanied by a separate digital signature, each in its own part — used by digitally signed email (S/MIME, PGP/MIME).
Text — human-readable text
Content meant to be read directly as text, without needing a specialized program to decode it.Plain text, with no markup or formatting at all — the most basic and universally understood value in the entire MIME registry.
HTML document — the markup language behind every web page.
CSS stylesheet — defines the visual presentation of an HTML document.
Comma-separated values — a simple tabular format, widely used to export/import spreadsheets and data between systems.
The correct MIME type for JavaScript files since RFC 9239 (2022), which obsoleted application/javascript and other older variants in favor of this single value.
Text formatted in Markdown — a lightweight markup syntax (headings, lists, emphasis) widely used in technical documentation and READMEs.
XML document — registered by the same RFC as application/xml (RFC 7303), historically used when the content should be readable as plain text by a human.
iCalendar — a format for calendar events, appointments, and invitations (.ics), supported by virtually every email and calendar client.
vCard — a format for digital contact/business cards (.vcf), supported by virtually every contacts app and email client.
Tab-separated values (TSV) — CSV's sibling using a tab as the separator, useful when the data itself may contain commas.
Older convention for YAML content, used during the 20+ years the format had no official registration — now superseded by application/yaml (RFC 9512, 2024).
Enriched Text — a text format with basic formatting markup, a little-used predecessor of the modern RTF.
Video — video
Video formats — container and codec used by browsers and players.MP4 video — the most universally supported video container, typically pairing the H.264/H.265 codec with AAC audio.
WebM video — Google/Mozilla's open format, typically pairing the VP8/VP9/AV1 codec with Opus/Vorbis audio, a royalty-free alternative to MP4.
Video in the MPEG format (MPEG-1/MPEG-2) — the older standard, the technical foundation of DVDs and early digital broadcasts.
Video in the Ogg container — typically with the open Theora codec, now largely superseded by WebM.
Video in Apple's QuickTime format (.mov) — a flexible container, historically the technical basis for part of the MP4 specification.
Video in Microsoft's AVI (Audio Video Interleave) format — an old 1990s container, never received a formal IANA registration.
3GPP video — a compact format created for transmission over third-generation mobile networks, still used by many phone cameras for short videos.
Video in the Matroska container (.mkv) — a very flexible open-source format, popular for storing video with multiple audio/subtitle tracks; never received a formal registration.
Flash Video (.flv) — a format tied to Adobe Flash Player, practically extinct today since Flash's discontinuation in 2020.
Where the 9 categories come from
Unlike other references in this catalog (like Network Ports or HTTP Headers, which had to invent a classification because no official one exists), the categories here aren't a curation of our own: they're the 9 "top-level types" that IANA's own registry defines for MIME types — application, audio, font, image, message, model, multipart, text, and video. Every MIME type must start with one of these nine, followed by a slash and the subtype (e.g. in "image/png", "image" is the top-level type and "png" the subtype).
Registered, unofficial, and deprecated
Registered means the type has a formal, current entry in the IANA registry — the vast majority of this catalog, including old formats like binary Word 97-2003 (application/msword), whose registration was never cancelled even though real-world use has moved to the modern format. Unofficial means the type never completed a formal registration — the "x-" prefix is, by historical convention, the signal for exactly that (e.g. application/x-7z-compressed), but a few types without that prefix were also never actually registered (e.g. application/vnd.geo+json, image/x-icon). Deprecated is the rarest state: the type did have a formal registration, but the IANA registry itself now carries an explicit obsolescence note in favor of a newer type — the clearest example is application/javascript, formally obsoleted in 2022 (RFC 9239) in favor of text/javascript.
What the Content-Type header is
Every time a server responds to an HTTP request with a file — a page, an image, a PDF, an API response — it includes a Content-Type header telling the browser (or any other client) what kind of content it's receiving, so it knows how to interpret the bytes that follow. It's this header, not the file name's extension, that the browser uses to decide how to display the content — which is why a misconfigured server, answering a .json file with Content-Type: text/plain, can make the browser treat that JSON as plain text instead of structured data. application/octet-stream is the list's "generic" catch-all — it means "binary data, no more specific format known", the fallback value used when the server doesn't know, or doesn't say, what the file actually is.
Frequently asked questions
Because, before a format earns a formal IANA registration, the community already needs some identifier to use — and the historical convention for that is the "x-" prefix (e.g. application/x-rar-compressed), signaling "experimental, unregistered extension". When the format eventually gets an official registration (application/vnd.rar, in 2019), the old type doesn't vanish from real-world use overnight — plenty of legacy software keeps sending the "x-" value for years. The same pattern repeats with YAML (application/yaml, official since 2024, vs. the older text/x-yaml) and with the Windows icon (image/vnd.microsoft.icon, official since 2003, vs. the ubiquitous image/x-icon, which in practice Windows itself still uses).
Because popularity of use and registration status are two different things. RFC 9239 (2022) formally obsoleted application/javascript (and several other old JavaScript types) in favor of text/javascript — the IANA registry itself now carries the note "OBSOLETED in favor of text/javascript" on the application/javascript entry. This doesn't break anything that already works (browsers keep accepting the old value for compatibility), but any new server configuration should use text/javascript.
application/octet-stream is an explicit value with a formal, registered meaning: "this is binary data, with no more specific type to declare". Not sending the Content-Type header at all is different — it leaves the client completely free to guess the type on its own (which browsers do through a technique called MIME sniffing, inspecting the file's first bytes), a behavior historically linked to security issues when the guessed type wasn't what the server actually intended to serve.
Because types with the vnd. ("vendor") prefix follow a convention of naming precisely which specific vendor format is meant, to avoid collision between two different formats that, without that care, could claim the same short name. application/pdf could stay short because it was registered as a single open format with no name competition; the Word .docx format, on the other hand, is part of an entire family of Office Open XML formats (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, each with macro/no-macro variants), and the long name avoids ambiguity within that family.
Yes, and the reverse is also true. image/jpeg accepts both .jpg and .jpeg (historically, old file systems limited extensions to 3 characters) — one type, two extensions. A single extension can, in theory, correspond to more than one MIME type depending on context (.ico is served both as image/vnd.microsoft.icon and as image/x-icon in practice) — which is why the server's Content-Type, not the file name's extension, is the source of truth for what a file actually is.
Both are formally registered by the same RFC (RFC 7303), with a subtle difference in recommendation: application/xml is the recommended value for most new use cases, while text/xml historically signaled "this XML can be read as plain text by a human without special processing" — a distinction that in practice stopped mattering to most modern tools, but neither was ever obsoleted by the registry itself.
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