Firefox 7 and Chrome 13 let you prefix just about any URL with “view-source:” and see the raw bytes. It works for GIFs, PDFs and other binary assets.
For example:
view-source:http://www.adobe.com/pdf/pdfs/ISO32000-1PublicPatentLicense.pdf
Since PDF is a quasi-ASCII format, you can easily find interesting details like this embedded in the markup:
It doesn’t work in Safari 5.0 or IE 9 — they don’t recognize the “view-source:” prefix. Not sure about other browser versions…
thanks. I was wondering what happened to “view source” in the drop down menu.
Paul Baker In Chrome at least, it’s still on the context menu as View Page Source and Chrome respects the old Netscape Ctrl-U shortcut.
I think I have heard of a petition to add it back to the menu in firefox. Hope to find that link when I do a tab sweep this weekend. 🙂