applicationvnd

Application/vnd is the vendor tree of Internet media types used with the top-level type application. The vnd abbreviation stands for vendor, indicating that the subtype is defined by a specific vendor or organization rather than by a generic format. The correct and widely used form is application/vnd, not applicationvnd, which is typically a typographical error or parsing issue.

The subtype structure generally follows the pattern vnd.[vendor].[format] or similar variants that describe the vendor and the data format. Examples include application/vnd.ms-excel for Microsoft Excel files, application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document for Word documents in the OOXML family, application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text for OpenDocument Text, and application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml for KML data. There are many other registered types that cover proprietary and open formats used by software from various vendors.

Registration and governance of these types are managed through the IANA media-type registries, under RFC 6838. Vendors or standards bodies submit subtype names, provide authoritative definitions, and obtain an official registry entry. Once registered, the subtype should be uniquely owned by the submitting party, who maintains the specification and any future revisions. Clients and servers rely on these registrations to determine how to handle and process the payload.

Usage considerations include the fact that vendor-specific types may not be recognized by all software, especially older or minimal implementations. When possible, applications should rely on widely supported types or provide explicit handling for known vendor formats registered under application/vnd. See also MIME types and RFC 6838.

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