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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T00:59:08+00:00

Does an official URN for the MIME type exist? Mozilla Firefox and other applications

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Does an official URN for the MIME type exist?

Mozilla Firefox and other applications use notations like “urn:mimetype:text/plain” or “urn:mimetype:handler:text/plain“.
There are two problems with this approach:

  1. No “mimetype” namespace exists according to the IANA’s official registry (http://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-namespaces/). Thus, only “urn:x-mimetype” would be a valid namespace (according to RFC 3406 section 4.1).

  2. The slash “/” may not be used in URNs according to RFC 2141 section 2.2. But it could be encoded to “%2F“.

All that considered, is there another way to represent the MIME type “text/plain” as an URN than “urn:x-mimetype:text%2Fplain“?

[UPDATE: Thinking about it, an URI would be ok too. But I can’t find no URI for MIME type neither.]

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    FYI, I read the presence of / as a SHOULD NOT by RFC 2141, rather than a MUST NOT.

    For this approach I would just use the URI of the assignment, e.g. <http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/zip>. The only caveat is that not all of them dereference. If you can live with that though, you should be OK.

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