What MIME is
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. An industry-standard code that defines how an e-mail message is sent in code and then decoded when received at its destination. It is actually a protocol for e-mail that enables the transmission of non-text data, such as graphics, audio, video, and other binary types of files. These files are encoded into text that would look like gobbledygook to us.
An e-mail program, such as Eudora, is MIME-compliant if it can send and receive files using the MIME standard. The MIME standard is universally used by Internet servers to identify the files that are sent to clients. Since the files are identified by the servers, users can accommodate new file formats by adding them to their browser's list of MIME-types and programs for handling each type. S/MIME, the secure version of the standard, utilizes an encryption system to protect e-mail, even when it is sent between different e-mail clients. S/MIME messages include the message itself and the encryption information (such as a digital certificate).
The meaning of HTML
Hypertext Markup Language. The lingua franca for publishing hypertext on the World Wide Web. HTML is a nonproprietary format based on SGML. It can be created and processed in a wide range of software programs, from simple plain text editors to WYSIWYG programs to sophisticated authoring tools.
HTML is a mark-up language (versus a programming language) that uses tags to structure text into headings, paragraphs, lists, and links (like those seen on the NetLingo.com HTML Code Cheat Sheet). It tells a Web browser how to display text and images. You can see a Web page's HTML code if you select "view source" from the View menu in your Web browser.
A question that often comes up is how to make HTML code be visible on a page and not execute? You do this by using the ASCII code equivalents of the "less than" and "greater than" symbols (this way it is interpreted as just text and not real HTML code).
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