Can I render text/plain content as it arrives?

Question

I have an server that delivers data that it processes over about 15 seconds. The headers are as follows:

Content-Type:text/plain; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding:chunked

With telnet I can confirm that data is sent continuously over 15 seconds. In a browser the whole page hangs until the entire request is received, and then it renders all at once.

Occasionally on longer requests it hangs for a while and then starts streaming data to the screen as it arrives, but I have not deduced the threshold where that happens.

Is there some header or other magic I can send to make the browser render the content as soon as it is availible?

Might not work with text/plain according to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6233562/node-js-chunked-transfer-encoding#comment17496397_11210088 — Greg Bray, Dec 09 '15 at 19:22
yeah, thinking ajax and handling the events directly might work, but not such a big deal really. — captncraig, Dec 09 '15 at 19:24

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:51

5

According to this related question you might be able to get it to work by using text/html as the content type (still need the charset=UTF-8 part too) or adding X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff to work around a webkit bug

edited May 23 '17 at 11:51

Community

1
1

answered Dec 09 '15 at 19:27

Greg Bray

14,929
12
80
104

Yeah, that works, but I also have to inject a `
```
` at the beginning of my stream to make it render like text/plain.
```
– captncraig Dec 09 '15 at 20:54
1

Works fine with just the "X-Content-Type-Options", for text stream. – sanjarcode Feb 13 '23 at 17:46

Can I render text/plain content as it arrives?

1 Answers1