[whatwg] Style sheet loading and parsing (over HTTP)

Wed May 30 13:20:51 PDT 2007

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> <snip>
> 
> I was serious. If you want to display plain text in the browser content 
> area, it seems that prepending "<plaintext>" and sending it as text/html 
> is more likely not to invoke sniffing than sending it as text/plain. 
> This use case doesn't require an end tag.
> 
Ah.  That, "prepending", gives me a better idea of your meaning.  Eg., a 
file, source.html, containing
<plaintext>
<html>
...
</html>
would not be sniffed by IE, and would be rendered as plain text.  Where 
normally, the file, as source.txt, with its text/plain content type, and 
without the <plaintext> tag, would be sniffed by IE and rendered as an 
html document.

If a UAs were to simply honor the server response header, it would 
obviate the need for such an inelegant work-around.

Thanks for the clarification.

cheers,

gary
-- 
Anyone can make a usable web site. It takes a graphic
designer to make it slow, confusing and painful to use.