What's the difference of ContentType and MimeType

Question

As far as I know, they are absolute equal. However, browsing some django docs, I\'ve found this piece of code:

HttpResponse.__init__(content=\'\', mimetype=Non

Answer 1

I've always viewed contentType to be a superset of mimeType. The only difference being the optional character set encoding. If the contentType does not include an optional character set encoding then it is identical to a mimeType. Otherwise, the mimeType is the data prior to the character set encoding sequence.

E.G. text/html; charset=UTF-8

text/html is the mimeType
; is the additional parameters indicator
charset=UTF-8 is the character set encoding parameter

E.G. application/msword

application/msword is the mimeType
It cannot have a character set encoding as it describes a well formed octet-stream not comprising characters directly.