4.1 Obsolete Features

The Plain Text element is used to terminates the HTML entity and to indicate that what follows is not SGML which does not require parsing. Instead, an old HTTP convention specified that what followed was an ASCII (MIME "text/plain") body. Its presence is an optimization. There is no closing tag.

Example of use:

<PLAINTEXT>
0001 This is line one of a long listing
0002 file from <ANY@HOST.INC.COM> which is sent

The Example element and Listing element have been replaced by the Preformatted Text element.

These styles allow text of fixed-width characters to be embedded absolutely as is into the document. The syntax is:

<LISTING>
...
</LISTING>

<XMP>
...
</XMP>

Between the opening and closing tags:

• The text may contain any ISO Latin-1 printable characters, expect for the end tag opener. The Example and Listing elements have historically used specifications which do not conform to SGML. Specifically, the text may contain ISO Latin printable characters, including the tag opener, as long it they does not contain the closing tag in full.

• SGML does not support this form. HTML user agents may vary on how they interpret other tags within Example and Listing elements.

• Line boundaries within the text are rendered as a move to the beginning of the next line, except for one immediately following a start tag or immediately preceding an end tag.

• The ASCII horizontal tab character must be interpreted as the smallest positive nonzero number of spaces which will leave the number of characters so far on the line as a multiple of 8. Its use is not recommended.