Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Mime Media Types

Application specific media type.

Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) MIME type defined in RFC3240 [http://ietf.org/rfc/rfc3240.txt].

This format is very prone to compatibility problems. If sharing of edit-able text is required, text/plain, text/html or text/rtf should be used instead.

The Portable Document Format is recommended for written text that is completely laid out and read-only. PDF is a platform independent, widely deployed, and open specification with freely available creation and rendering tools.

Audio media type.

This is a format for single channel audio, encoded using 8bit ISDN mu-law [PCM] at a sample rate of 8000 Hz. This format is standardized by: CCITT, Fascicle III.4 -Recommendation G.711. Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) of Voice Frequencies. Geneva, 1972.

ADPCM allows compressing audio data. It is defined in the Internet specification RFC 2421 [ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2421.txt]. Its implementation base is unclear.

MPEG-1 Audio layer-3 is an audio compression algorithm and file format defined in ISO 11172-3 and ISO 13818-3. MP3 has an adjustable sampling frequency for highly compressed telephone to CD quality audio.

Image media type.

This is recommended only for fax applications.

GIF is a popular format that is universally well supported. However GIF is patent encumbered and should therefore be used with caution.

This format is required for high compression of high color photographs. It is a "lossy" compression, but the difference to lossless compression is almost unnoticeable to the human vision.

Portable Network Graphics (PNG) [http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png] is a widely supported lossless image compression standard with open source code available.

Although TIFF (Tag Image File Format) is an international standard it has many interoperability problems in practice. Too many different versions that are not handled by all software alike.

Model media type.

This is an openly standardized format for 3D models that can be useful for virtual reality applications such as anatomy or biochemical research (visualization of the steric structure of macromolecules)

Multipart Media Type

The HL7 clinical document Architecture, Level 1 MIME package.

For any text

For marked-up text according to the Hypertext Mark-up Language. HTML markup is sufficient for typographically marking-up most written-text documents. HTML is platform independent and widely deployed.

For any plain text. This is the default and is equivalent to a character string (ST) data type.

The Rich Text Format is widely used to share word-processor documents. However, RTF does have compatibility problems, as it is quite dependent on the word processor. May be useful if word processor edit-able text should be shared.

For structured character based data. There is a risk that general SGML/XML is too powerful to allow a sharing of general SGML/XML documents between different applications.

For compatibility, this represents the HL7 v2.x FT data type. Its use is recommended only for backward compatibility with HL7 v2.x systems.

For structured character based data. There is a risk that general SGML/XML is too powerful to allow a sharing of general SGML/XML documents between different applications.

Video media type.

MPEG is an international standard, widely deployed, highly efficient for high color video; open source code exists; highly interoperable.

The AVI file format is just a wrapper for many different codecs; it is a source of many interoperability problems.