CODEWITHSUNDEEP
zipmime-types
numone
numone

Reputation: 774

zip mime types, when to pick which one

So far for Mime Types for Zip files I've seen:

I guess my question is which is the "best" and why? Why is there so many choices? I use winrar and it doesn't seem to care what the Mimetype is, but WinZip seems to only like multipart/x-zip and application/octet-stream. is there a Mimetype I can have all Zip files be downloaded as that will work in all programs?

thanks!

Upvotes: 56

Views: 58537

Answers (2)

Tim Taurit
Tim Taurit

Reputation: 9239

How to recognize a valid MIME type?

Now about the zip specifically...

  • application/zip is a standard MIME type for zip files, officially registered with IANA. It seems like a good first choice :)
  • application/octet-stream is defined in RFC 2045 and 2046: The “octet-stream” subtype is used to indicate that a body contains arbitrary binary data, so the content can be anything, not just zip.
  • multipart/x-zip - unlike a “discrete” type, the “multipart” type is one which represents a document that's comprised of multiple component parts, each of which may have its own individual MIME type. I suspect that the logic here is that a compressed file consists of multiple files. Thus, zip fits the “multipart” definition. But to me, it looks like overinterpretation, I would expect plain-text delimiters between parts to classify content as multipart. Moreover, it's not registered as a standard.
  • application/zip-compressed - a non-standard type, the naming violates RFC2046: A media type value beginning with the characters “X-” is a private value, to be used by consenting systems by mutual agreement. Any format without a rigorous and public definition must be named with an “X-” prefix
  • application/x-zip-compressed - some non-standard convention, I'm not sure if there is any significant usage
  • application/x-zip - some non-standard convention, I'm not sure if there is any significant usage

Upvotes: 18

Nickolay Olshevsky
Nickolay Olshevsky

Reputation: 14160

Registered with IANA MIME type is application/zip : http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/zip

WinZip is not a reference implementation (since originally ZIP standard is developed by PkWare).

Upvotes: 35

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