PLAINTEXT

Description

The PLAINTEXT element defined a separated multi-line set of text

to be rendered as it exists in the source document with

the same line breaks. It was designed to ignore all subsequent

HTML tags. Therefore, it was always last in a document, allowing

the remainder of the document to be presented as text.

Minimum Attributes

<PLAINTEXT>characters...

</PLAINTEXT>

All Possible Attributes

<PLAINTEXT WIDTH="..."

LANG="..."

DIR=ltr|rtl>characters...

</PLAINTEXT>

Elements Allowed Within...

Only the PLAINTEXT ending element is recognized as an element

inside of PLAINTEXT content, all else is treated as character data.

Allowed In Content Of...

Variations

Most browsers use fixed-width characters for PLAINTEXT text.

A few browsers accepted the ending element, which meant that

the ending element could not exist in the text.

The RFC 1866 DTD specifies that the ending element can exist and

implies that a browser should recognize the ending

element but accept everything else as just text.

It also prohibits it from being nested inside any element but the

outer HTML element itself.

Comments in RFC 1866 state that PLAINTEXT has no ending element and

all characters after the start element are data.

This element existed in Version 0 and has been replaced by the

<PRE> element.

RFC 1866 has declared PLAINTEXT as deprecated

and some current browsers no longer recognize it.

The LANG and DIR attributes are introduced with the

internationalization proposal.