You should see a window open with this text in typewriter style intermingled with a series of bracketed commands. To make an efficient transfer, the source information relies on your browser to provide part of the page information locally. The bracketed commands tell your browser what to do. Most require special viewers like Netscape . Acrobat is popular because it allows tight control over the format on your screen.
Efficiency is reduced in the transfer.
Try this example from the New York Times . Plain text . This highly efficient transmission and recognized as a standard by most computer software. There are other text standards, but they're largely of historic interest or are used for non-roman alphabets. Try this readable but not very graphically attractive page .