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

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 1:45 AM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@annevk.nl> wrote:
> 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

Neat! text/html and text/plain have a polyglot set!

> 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.)

Received on Friday, 22 February 2013 11:42:27 UTC