The funniest thing about mime.info is what it is not. It has nothing to do with e-mail attachments, MIME types, or browser headers. It is The World of Mime Theatre, and it has been standing quietly on the Web since 1996.
Visit The World of Mime Theatre
That date matters. A specialist site created in 1996 had to solve a problem that search engines, social networks, Wikipedia, YouTube, and modern event platforms would later attack from different directions: how do you make a scattered international art form findable?
Mime.info answered by building directories.
The site accumulated listings for performers, companies, schools, workshops, organizations, publications, films, videos, festivals, and related websites. It also built a library with an encyclopedia of mime, historical writing, biographies, and older texts. Some of the pages still carry copyright lines beginning in 1996, while others show updates stretching well into the 2020s.
That gives the site an unusual texture. It is not simply a dead 1990s homepage preserved in amber. It is an old information architecture that kept receiving new information.
A directory before everything became a platform
The old Web loved hand-built directories because there often was no better way to organize a niche.
If you wanted to find mime schools in another country, a physical-theatre company, a publication, a festival, or information about Marcel Marceau, there was no giant centralized service guaranteed to have it. Somebody had to gather the material and make the links.
Mime.info did exactly that.
The library alone includes an encyclopedia, historical material, books, articles, and resources tracing mime and pantomime across centuries. Other sections preserve contact information and names for companies and organizations that may otherwise have vanished from casual search.
Its creator, Lorin Eric Salm, describes The World of Mime Theatre as first created in 1996. In 2026 the project reached its thirtieth year online, which is a remarkable lifespan for a site built around one specialized performing art.
There is also something very old-Web about the way the project assumes human curation is a feature rather than a defect. Visitors are invited to submit missing schools, companies, books, and other resources. The site grows because somebody notices that a thing exists and tells the webmaster.
No recommendation algorithm is required.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is full of pages like this: small information systems that existed because one person or group decided a subject deserved a permanent home on the Web.
Mime.info is especially good because the domain name looks like infrastructure documentation right up until a silent performer walks out from behind it.