Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by yellowapple 1341 days ago
> You're missing the point.

You're missing the point. If Cloudflare's issue is with bandwidth, then they should say so and leave it at that, not conjure up this pathetic excuse about .txt files somehow not being "web content". Does wrapping that data in <html><body><pre> </pre></body></html> magically fix the bandwidth issues?

2 comments

Even just plain text file without any tags is a valid HTML 5 file. You don't need any tags. <html> and <body> are implied.

All you'd need is a <pre> tags or <style> somewhere if you'd want it rendered not just as one large paragraph.

I guess you may need a <!DOCTYPE html>

Just making a file valid HTML doesn't make it "web content". This file is being fetched by an application, not being viewed by a user.

I'm not sure this is the most reasonable rule but there are definitely some benificial aspects to it. For example the load on human-viewed content is limited by how often people want to view it. Not how often their browser wants to redownload it.

> Just making a file valid HTML doesn't make it "web content".

By Cloudflare's rationale it does.

> For example the load on human-viewed content is limited by how often people want to view it. Not how often their browser wants to redownload it.

Bandwidth is bandwidth. If 100,000,000 humans want to download a 10KB text/html page v. 100,000,000 programs wanting to download a 10KB text/plain file, both within the same time period, then that's going to be the same degree of load on Cloudflare's end.