The tabStreamTokenizer Class The getContent Method Using the Content Handler Summary Java's URL class gives applets and applications easy access to the World Wide Web using the HTTP protocol. This is fine and dandy if you can get the information you need into a format that a Web server or CGI script can access. This is where protocol and content handlers come in.
Handlers are classes that extend the capabilities of the standard URL class.
Content handlers take an InputStream for a given MIME type and convert it into a Java object of the appropriate type. As you may have guessed from the name, it originally was proposed for the context of enclosing nontextual components in Internet e-mail. The MIME standard, described in RFC 1521, defines an extra set of headers similar to those on Internet e-mail. The headers describe attributes such as the method of encoding the content and the MIME content type. This site also has specifications or pointers to specifications for each type.