Re: Revisiting Authoritative Metadata (was: The failure of Appendix C as a transition technique)

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 9:29 AM, "Martin J. Dürst"
<duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote:
> In that scenario, how would you get a browser to display any format with
> such a magic number,... as plain text? Many formats, HTML and XHTML
> included, are at the same time plain text.

Presumably that's why <plaintext> was invented before HTTP/1.0 made
the whole system brittle with MIME types. It still works. And in fact,
to this day browsers display text/plain as an HTML document with the
tokenizer set to the PLAINTEXT state. That's even standardized:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#read-text (And
observable, e.g. http://annevankesteren.com/robots.txt in Firefox, but
you can also poke at the DOM of an <iframe> displaying a text/plain
document and style it similarly in other browsers.)


-- 
http://annevankesteren.nl/

Received on Friday, 22 February 2013 09:46:17 UTC