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by subless 164 days ago
This entirely depends on your perspective/interpretation of “text-only”.

To me, having only text as the output with no ads, videos, or images is “text-only”. It doesn’t matter how it’s presented as long as it’s just text.

But I also see your perspective. You want plain defaults with white background color, black foreground color, and no formatting.
4 comments
eleventen 164 days ago
This thread is about text the MIME type. It’s not a subjective definition.

> The rules are simple - content which has the MIME type of text/plain. No HTML, no multimedia, no RTF, no XML, no ANSI colour escape sequences.

Your definition is fine for you, but it’s not what TFA is about.

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abejfehr 164 days ago
I feel like the article should've been called "plaintext-only websites" or something, because if you had asked me I would've also defined "text-only" as image/video-less websites
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ynac 164 days ago
I struggle with the purity of meaning for text-only as well. Before this thread, I didn't understand the mime settings; I've been living a lie with a browser friendly landing page that uses:

<!DOCTYPE HTML><plaintext>

And then all the other pages of the site to be pure *.txt files. In the end, until there are standards to point to, I just accept minimalism as the scale. I have ads, layouts, boxes / frames, and all sorts of possibly annoying aspects to my textsites. It is a medium that's just as easily abused as any!

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kgwxd 164 days ago
"No arbitrary code execution" is how I'd put it. "Ads" can be plain text, they just usually aren't on the internet. If a plain text site decided to include them once in a while, I'd celebrate the choice.
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loganc2342 164 days ago
It’s more so that “text” in this case refers to “text (.txt) file” rather than “letters and numbers”
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