The view-source

URI scheme A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a unique sequence of characters that identifies a logical or physical resource used by web technologies. URIs may be used to identify anything, including real-world objects, such as people and places, conc ...

is used by some

web browsers A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

to construct URIs that result in the browser displaying the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...

of a web page or other

web resource A web resource is any identifiable resource (digital, physical, or abstract) present on or connected to the World Wide Web.< ...

. For example, the URI view-source:https://example.com should show the source of the page located at https://example.com
/code>. In the early internet, View Source helped people to create their own web pages, learning by example. On 25 May 2011, the 'view-source' URI scheme was officially registered with IANA per RFC 4395.

Browser support

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current ...

and

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Windows line of operating systems ( ...

both supported the scheme, but support was dropped from Internet Explorer in Windows XP SP2 due to security problems. Firefox also suffered a similar security issue (by combining view-source and javascript URIs), but still supported it in Firefox 1.5 after being fixed. In 2009 a new discovered bug was fixed in Firefox 3.0.9.

References

{{web browsers Web browsers URI schemes Computer-related introductions in 2011