Non-ASCII support

For electronic communications, letters of the Roman alphabet are encoded into numbers according to the ASCII-coded character set. However, for billions of users whose native language is not English and who do not use the unaccented Latin alphabet, ASCII is unusable. MIME allows other alphabets to be used via defined character sets. For example, the ISO 8859-1 standard extends the basic ASCII character set to include accented characters used in French, Spanish and German; ISO 8859-8 is for Hebrew; and BIG5 is widely used in Taiwan, where it has become a de facto standard. Content Type Labeling

To identify the type of content in a file, most operating systems use a short filename extension. MIME provides a better, more specific indicator, the MIME type, which includes a primary type, a slash and a subtype. The primary type is quite general; examples include text, audio, video, image and application. The subtype provides the information a computer program needs to properly handle the content. For example, image subtypes include JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF and others. A complete MIME type example is "image/GIF," where "image" is the primary type and "GIF" is the subtype.

MIME types are important to the smooth running of the Internet. When a Web server sends content (which might be HTML text, JPEG or GIF images, or a PDF file) to a Web browser, it also includes a MIME-type descriptor. This is how the browser knows when to display HTML text and images, or when to start Acrobat Reader for a PDF file.

Support for nontext content