The server, which is under control of the document provider, should know what kinds of documents it is serving.
text/plain
). It's only been in the
past few years that the alternative of that they are more
commonly type application/x-msword
.
It is up to the document provider system (the web server) to
tell the client (the web browser) what the type is. A server
could be configured to say text/plain
for each .doc file. It could be configured to say
application/x-msword
for files it finds in particular
directories. It could even be configured to give a specific content-type
for a specific file.
Note that the server does not communicate to the client the general scheme it uses. It just provides content-type information for every file it serves.
MIME was originally developed for Email, but it was also developed to be a general way of communicating this sort of information between document providers and others. The WWW wouldn't work without it.