Document links in Safari

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When browsing the internet with safari, if I click on a document, my macbook automatically downloads the document to my computer before i can view it with textedit...is there a way to simply click on the link and "view" the document as opposed to it saving to my computer?

I don't believe so, considering your computer has to download the information to view it. But maybe you can set the default application to view web documents to TextEdit. But I'm not sure how one would do that.