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

Thu May 31 03:20:07 PDT 2007

You should rather begin with (plain text) CR LF to subvert document type
sniffing.  It is meant to be plain text, after all.  You do not use tags in
plain text, be they fake or genuine.
Cheers
Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: whatwg-bounces at lists.whatwg.org
[mailto:whatwg-bounces at lists.whatwg.org] On Behalf Of gary turner
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2007 10:21 PM
To: Henri Sivonen
Cc: WHATWG; Ian Hickson; Gervase Markham
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Style sheet loading and parsing (over HTTP)

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.