Chapter 7. Non-HTML Document Types

In addition to HTML documents, about a dozen other file formats are recognized and displayed by the rendering engines of modern web browsers; a list that is likely to grow over time.

Because of the powerful scripting capabilities available in some of these formats, and because of the antics of browser-content handling, the set of natively supported non-HTML inputs deserves a closer examination at this point, even if a detailed discussion of some of their less-obvious security consequences—such as content sniffing—will have to wait until Part II of this book.

Plaintext Files

Perhaps the most prosaic type of non-HTML document recognized by every single browser is a plaintext file. In this rendering mode, the input ...

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