Re: "treat this as text" option

Thanks for asking....the use case is so clear in my mind, I forget others
can't read it :o)

I get a web page that is advertising a mime type that is a special kind of
text.  E.g., Dan Connolly tells me to look at the newest rdf he's written,
with mime type text/xml.  I want to tell my browser to open this as though it
were plain text, i.e., in a "regular" browser window.  My current browser (and
most I've tried) only give me the pick app/save file choice, so I wind up
having to spawn an external editor (automatically or manually, depending on
which I select) when the browser could ^&*( well show me the text itself, if
only it would let me tell it to do so.

DanC's clarification

> I encouraged Lynn to send this request here because
> the MIME specs say[1] that unknown text/* types should be
> treated as text/plain, but web browsers don't do that.

is excellent, but I maintain that I might even want to have this option (treat
as text) for other types (not explicitly specified as subtypes of text).
I.e., there are two problems:  Browsers should follow the mime spec wrt
unknown text/* types, and (separately) the unknown mime type error message
should include a "treat as text" option.

Lynn

Aaron Swartz wrote:

> On Friday, September 7, 2001, at 11:44  AM, Lynn Andrea Stein wrote:
>
> > I really wish that browsers would give me the option of telling it that
> > a particular mime type represents just plain text, i.e., that it should
> > be viewed using the browser itself rather than an external application.
>
> I assume you mean this on the client side because on the server
> side you can just send it as text/plain. On the client side I
> suppose you can save it as a text file and open it.
>
> What's the use case you're envisioning?
>
> --
>        "Aaron Swartz"      |              The Semantic Web
>   <mailto:me@aaronsw.com>  |  <http://logicerror.com/semanticWeb-long>
> <http://www.aaronsw.com/> |        i'm working to make it happen

Received on Saturday, 8 September 2001 18:43:05 UTC