MIME Types Cheatsheet — Common Content Types for Web Development

MIME types (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), also called media types or content types, tell browsers and servers what kind of data is being transmitted. They appear in Content-Type headers, <link> and <script> tags, file upload handling, and API responses. Getting the MIME type wrong can cause files to download instead of display, or trigger security warnings.

The format is always type/subtype, optionally followed by parameters like ; charset=utf-8.

Text Types

Always include charset=utf-8 for text types:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Image Types

Audio Types

Video Types

Application Types

Office Document Types

Font Types

Multipart Types

Used for file uploads and email.

<!-- File upload form -->
<form enctype="multipart/form-data" method="POST">
  <input type="file" name="document" accept=".pdf,.docx" />
</form>

Setting MIME Types

# Nginx
types {
    application/json  json;
    font/woff2        woff2;
}

# Apache (.htaccess)
AddType application/json .json
AddType font/woff2 .woff2

# Express.js
res.type('application/json');
res.set('Content-Type', 'text/html; charset=utf-8');

# Fetch API
fetch('/api', {
  headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
  body: JSON.stringify(data)
});

Look up any MIME type with the MIME Types Reference tool.