The MIME standard is defined in large part by the Internet standards documents RFC 1521 and RFC 1522. These are common functions allowed by most of today's newer e-mail systems. You also can use MIME data types to spice up HTML documents and presentations by allowing links to multimedia components such as graphics, images, audio, video, and server-push animation. You use these types not simply to make the presentations nicer, but also to extend the functionality of the applications and to add value for your users. Many of your readers who enjoy surfing the Net have experienced MIME without even realizing it.
Many sites now incorporate links to audio and video clips to enhance their documents.
Figure G.1 shows part of the United States Department of State's Heroes page. Using audio and video MIME data types. The United States Department of State's Heroes page is a nice example of how you can incorporate audio and video into an HTML document. This example illustrates how easy it is to incorporate multimedia components and MIME data types into data presentations. The small GIF images of an audio speaker and video camera are used as hypertext links and provide visual cues to the user that audio or video data is available by clicking those links.