MIME types: We will start with a very brief discussion about what MIME types are and in particular what MIME content types are. We will also see how they are associated with file suffixes in a particular system configuration file.
Modules: We will then introduce the concept of the module and, in particular, the module that allows the web server to interpret MIME types.
Let's take another look at the headers that get sent back by a fully configured web server.
HTTP/1.x 200 OK Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:53:35 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Linux/SUSE) Last-Modified: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:53:33 GMT Etag: "1c0e43-132-3caa4140" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 306 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html
In particular note the Content-Type: header. This identifies the document served as being of MIME content type text/html. This informs the browser that the document should be parsed as HTML rather than as plain text. This identification of content type is an important feature of HTTP that was lacking in many earlier transfer protocols.
Now let's look at the headers coming from our server as it currently stands.
HTTP/1.x 200 OK Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:49:42 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Linux/SUSE) Last-Modified: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:34:30 GMT Etag: "1c0e41-132-f8897580" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 306 Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/plain
The principal difference is that the Content-Type: header now reads text/plain.