Earlier use of whitespace coding: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.templetons.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;proletext.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.templetons.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;proletext.html</a><p>... Invisible formatting information is embedded in trailing spaces and tabs on the ends of lines in an ordinary looking document. In addition, &quot;blank&quot; lines contain spaces and tabs with hidden formatting meanings. Assuming typical 60 column lines, one can have over 300 different codings on the end of a line without going past 80 columns. (Far fewer are needed.) On a blank line, almost a billion codings are possible.<p>Documents with invisible formatting always start with a magic line, which begins with &quot;&lt;SP&gt;&lt;SP&gt;&lt;TAB&gt;&lt;SP&gt;&lt;SP&gt;&lt;TAB&gt;&quot; followed by version encoding. Thus documents can be spotted and formatted even without a Mime Content-Type header for this new text type. This otherwise useless combination of spaces and tabs on a blank line should virtually assure that random documents are not treated as formatted. ...