{{Obsolete_header}}
Summary
The HTML Plaintext Element (<plaintext>
) renders everything following the start tag as raw text, without interpreting any HTML. There is no closing tag, since everything after it is considered raw text.
Note: Do not use this element.
- This element has been deprecated since HTML 2 and was never implemented by all browsers; even those that did implement it didn't do so consistently. In addition, it is obsoleted in HTML 5; browsers that still accept it may simply treat it as a {{HTMLElement("pre")}} element, which still interprets HTML within, even though that's not what you probably want.
- If the {{HTMLElement("plaintext")}} element is the first element on the page (other than any non-displayed elements), do not use HTML at all. Configure your server to send your page with the
text/plain
MIME-type. - Instead of using this element, you should use the {{HTMLElement("pre")}} element or, if semantically adequate, the {{HTMLElement("code")}} element. Be sure to escape any "<", ">" and "&" characters, to avoid inadvertently interpreting content as HTML.
- A monospaced font can also be applied to a simple {{HTMLElement("div")}} element by applying an adequate CSS style using
monospace
as the generic-font value in a {{cssxref("font-family")}} property.
Attributes
This element has no other attributes than the global attributes, common to all elements.
DOM interface
This element implements the {{domxref('HTMLElement')}} interface.
Implementation note: Up to Gecko 1.9.2 inclusive, Firefox implements the interface {{domxref('HTMLSpanElement')}} for this element.
See also
- The {{HTMLElement("pre")}} and {{HTMLElement("code")}} elements to be used instead.
- The {{HTMLElement("listing")}} and {{HTMLElement("xmp")}} elements, similar to {{HTMLElement("plaintext")}} but also obsolete.
{{HTMLRef}}