MIME types

What is MIME?

MIME types (Multi-Purpose Internet Mail Extensions) is an Internet standard originally created to send and receive almost any kind of data via e-mail, but now also commonly used by web servers for all file transfers.

It is structured in types of data that include subtypes specifying different kinds of formated data (e.g.: type image and subtype gif). There are a huge amount of MIME types/subtypes and they are constantly growing in number, as new standards are created or new file formats become popular.

How does HTTrack work with MIME types?

HTTrack works as follows:

HTTrack uses MIME types as the known filetypes. On the contrary, server-side files won't be sent as MIME types, as neither those files will be sent to browsers at all, because browsers wouldn't know what to do with their code.

What happens if a server is not smart enough?

A problem may exist when HTTrack asks the server for unknown filetypes (such as cgi, asp, php, …): the robot depends on right answers from the server, and upon receipt of a wrong type, the local file will be incorrectly renamed. For example: server says a file is an image, despite it's actually an HTML file, so HTTrack will rename the local file as an image.

Options with MIME in mind

There are several equivalences already built in: -%A php2 php3 php4 php cgi asp jsp pl cfm nsf=text/html