MD MIME Type

About Markdown files

Registered in RFC 7763, with an optional variant parameter such as text/markdown; charset=utf-8; variant=GFM. Browsers show Markdown as plain text, they don’t render it; servers that don’t know the extension may send application/octet-stream, which makes the file download instead.

Other types seen for these files: text/x-markdown . Accept them when reading uploads, but send text/markdown yourself.

File signature

MD has no fixed signature: it is text without a magic number, so validate uploads by parsing the content rather than by checking bytes.

Serve .md with the right Content-Type

Content-Type: text/markdown; charset=utf-8

text/markdown md markdown;

AddType text/markdown .md .markdown
AddCharset UTF-8 .md .markdown

@md path *.md *.markdown
header @md Content-Type "text/markdown; charset=utf-8"

curl -sI https://example.com/file.md | grep -i '^content-type'
# Content-Type: text/markdown; charset=utf-8

Set the type in code

res.set('Content-Type', 'text/markdown; charset=utf-8');

import mimetypes

mimetypes.add_type('text/markdown', '.md')  # if your system doesn't know it
mimetypes.guess_type('file.md')[0]  # 'text/markdown'

mime.AddExtensionType(".md", "text/markdown; charset=utf-8")
w.Header().Set("Content-Type", "text/markdown; charset=utf-8")

Accept .md uploads

<input type="file" accept=".md,.markdown,text/markdown">

The accept attribute only filters the file picker; users can still choose another file. Listing the extension as well as the type matters, because operating systems don’t always report the type you expect.

Related types

• .txt (text/plain): Plain text
• .html (text/html): HTML
• .yaml (application/yaml): YAML

More data and text

.csv , .tsv , .json , .ndjson , .jsonld , .xml , .geojson , .ics , .sql . Look up any extension or type with the MIME type lookup.

Sources

• IANA registration: text/markdown
• MDN: Common media types

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Frequently asked questions