MIME (Mulitpurpose Internet Mail Extensions) is a protocol that describes the format of Internet messages. MIME allows messages to contain arbitrary binary files. A Server will insert the MIME header at the start of a Web transmission.  The Client will use this header to find an appication that can 'play' the type of data the header contains.  Word processing files such as .doc or worksheet files such as .xls etc. can be sent via the internet (as an attachment to an email message) in a non-text form.  

In summation, it allows a Web Server to tell a browser what type of file is to be displayed e.g. tiff, gif, jpeg etc.  When a browser receives HTML it can display that itself, however, if it is sent a file of type tiff etc. it must use an external viewer to display the MIME type.

As stated earlier, a MIME message is identified by special headers that give information about the message:
MIME-Version: Gives the Version of MIME used.
Content-Type: Gives the identification of the messages data e.g. text, application, image, video, audio etc.
Content-Transfer-Encoding: Identifies the type of text encoding used.  MIME caters for the following encodings; 7bit, 8bit, binary, base64 and quoted-printable.
For example:

MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Tyoe: image/jpeg Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

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