This purpose could be accomplished with a cryptographic signature of the plain text. Thin clients would have the option to just take the Internet's word for the

This purpose could be accomplished with a cryptographic signature of the plain text. Thin clients would have the option to just take the Internet's word for the provenance of the data, any system capable of running encryption algorithms can confirm they received the exact bytes the author intended. This would be an example of progressive enhancement, which has fallen out of favor.