25/01/10 Servers host resources Resources differ - they have different MIME types, and (where appropriate) - they have different encodings - they have different character sets - they have different languages. MIME type - MIME types are defined by the IANA, and were originally designed to describe email attachments - each comprises a major type and a minor type, e.g. image/gif, image/jpg, text/plain, text/html - server needs to know the MIME type of each resource - why - some modules need to know it to function correctly - to tell the client using the Content-Type: header - how: you need mod_mime, which consults the file called mime.types The file shows how file extensions (e.g. .png) relate to MIME types (e.g. image/png) - specify extra MIME types in httpd.conf, as follows: AddType text/xml .xml