PHP Headers and Popular Mime Types

By  on  

Like my Create a Basic Web Service Using PHP, MySQL, XML, and JSON illustrates, even though a file's extension ends in PHP, you can still tell the browser that you're outputting a different content type. Here are a few of the more popular content types used on the internet.

Atom

header('Content-Type: application/atom+xml');

CSS

header('Content-Type: text/css');

Javascript

header('Content-Type: text/javascript');

JPEG Image

header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');

JSON

header('Content-Type: application/json');

PDF

header('Content-Type: application/pdf');

RSS

header('Content-Type: application/rss+xml; charset=ISO-8859-1');

Text (Plain)

header('Content-Type: text/plain');

XML

header('Content-Type: text/xml');

Just because a file ends in .PHP doesn't mean it responds with XHTML -- respond however you'd like!

Recent Features

  • By
    LightFace:  Facebook Lightbox for MooTools

    One of the web components I've always loved has been Facebook's modal dialog.  This "lightbox" isn't like others:  no dark overlay, no obnoxious animating to size, and it doesn't try to do "too much."  With Facebook's dialog in mind, I've created LightFace:  a Facebook lightbox...

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Adding Events to Adding Events in MooTools

    Note: This post has been updated. One of my huge web peeves is when an element has click events attached to it but the element doesn't sport the "pointer" cursor. I mean how the hell is the user supposed to know they can/should click on...

  • By
    Duplicate the jQuery Homepage Tooltips Using MooTools

    The jQuery homepage has a pretty suave tooltip-like effect as seen below: Here's how to accomplish this same effect using MooTools. The XHTML The above XHTML was taken directly from the jQuery homepage -- no changes. The CSS The above CSS has been slightly modified to match the CSS rules already...

Discussion

  1. Great list of mime types.
    Perhaps I’d just be careful about the charset at the RSS example. People could add it blindly and suddenly accented characters would stop working if the rest of the site is using other encodings, like utf-8.

  2. Interesting list. Nothing new, but still nice. BTW Javascript and XML should be application, text is obsolete.

  3. @Matěj Grabovský: Interesting. Can you share your resource for knowing that?

  4. @David Walsh: Well, especially Wikipedia, RFCs (concretely RFC3023) and this thing.

  5. Thank you for sharing Matěj!

  6. You’re welcome, sir!

  7. BTW, It is common to prefix experimental mime types with ‘x-‘ (e.g. application/x-json)

  8. Very usefull stuff, I suggest you ad this one too (exe, zip, rar…)

    header("Content-Type: application/force-download");
    

    BTW, 7 comments, since may 7th… and it’s 7 a.m. here in Morocco

  9. Thanks a lot for this information.

  10. Content-Type or Content-type ?

  11. Have been using just the java, css and htmls. Will do with the rest later.
    Thanks for the list David.
    Pleasure reading.
    ;)

  12. Perfect list! Just what I was looking for. Thanks, Mr. Walsh :-)

  13. nodeset[0];
    $i = $r->new_child(“item”);
    $i->new_child(“title”, $head);
    $i->new_child(“link”, $link);
    $i->new_child(“description”, $comment);

    $out = domxml_dumpmem($doc);
    $file = $arch . “.xml”;
    $f = fopen($file, ‘w’);
    fputs($f, $out);
    fclose($f);

    echo $out;
    ?>

  14. Really nice, that’s exactly what I was looking for!
    Thanks a lot David, for another great tutorial.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!