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Comment by dxuh | Hacker News Reader

In these comments people have suggested to check for the User-Agent, but wouldn't it make more sense to check if the Accept header mentions text/html? I realize that curl sends "Accept: /", but if you wanted to see a page in plain text, you would have to pass -H "Accept: text/plain". I think that uses HTTP much more like it was intended.

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Browsers send "Accept: text/html" explicitly. For my pastebin[1], I send an HTML document when "text/html" is in the list of accepted formats, and I just send the plain data otherwise. This seems to work in practice, doesn't hard-code knowledge about curl, and doesn't require curl users to add custom headers.

[1]: https://sr.ht/~mort/coffeepaste/

I feel that neatly meets the kind of thing these params are for - if you ask a server for content and say "Accept: */*" the server should be free to return that content in whatever format it likes.

Why do you feel that way?

That's literally what the header means according to the rfc.

plus regardless of the official meaning, how _else_ would you interpret a header that's saying "I'll accept anything". Like the only reasonable response is "cool, here's what i felt like giving you since you gave me no guidance whatsoever and said you could handle anything"

That format should probably be the original file then, the one that was uploaded/pasted.

Yup, I do the same with dotfilehub.com

E.G,

curl https://dotfilehub.com/knoebber/emacs

results in plain text

That definitely seems closer to the intent of the header - User Agent is (kind of) who you are, Content Type is what you're sending, and Accept is what you'd like back. If you want plain text, you should be able to ask for it. It's super cool to see a plain text blog option show up, but I would have hoped it would be at the same route, not namespaced `/raw`, and using HTTP conventions. This sounds much more like a dig than it is - it's awesome to have a plain-text version of the author's content.

(Editorial correction: “Accept: /” → “Accept: */*” by backslash-escaping the asterisks.)

When I was hacking that for my blog I went with user-agent detection because of the UX. I don't consider this feature to be anything more that "look at his cool stuff I did" and telling random friend to copy and paste an url prefixed by curl is much easier proposition.

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