18 ms·

Text-only NPR

504 points by mrzool 9y ago

dpflan 9y ago
There was recently a post about text-only CNN too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15210022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15210022 If there are more text-only versions of sites, it seems like it may be cool to add a meta-view service in the style of HN or reddit. Is there an extant service that would easily allow this?
- akira2501 9y ago
  > If there are more text-only versions of sites I might have a reason to install lynx again.
  - ComputerGuru 9y ago
    Ugh. I literally just spent several hours adding a workaround to fish shell that addresses a bug in Lynx that’s been around forever that randomly makes html content unreadable [0]. And that was only possible after a lot of research and digging! How hard do you have to try to screw up the rendering of text only HTML? It turns out that lynx applies styles (foreground color + optional background color + optional underline) to rendered documents (so you can tell where a link is, mainly) by calculating the hash of the (HTML element name, class) tuple of each DOM member (probably supporting just one class per element). It turns out that the insanely popular `<div class="contents"></div>` element has a hash that collides with that of `em.a` (a link in emphasized text) which styles the link to become readable in the default styling applied to `em`... but due to that collision, `<div class="contents"></div>` elements, not having the default <em> styling applied to them, become entirely unreadably (black on dark blue). Lynx uses a very primitive hashing function (with a very small address space), and then (out of negligence or in the name of performance? Who knows!) doesn't check if the the (element, class) tuple (not its hash, but the actual tuple) matches that defined in the stylesheet... To make matters worse, doxygen (arguably the most popular open source documentation generation software) generates the HTML versions of its output with all the content in a div assigned a class called.... yup, you guessed it, `contents`. And that's where fish and my workaround came in :) [0]: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/4428 https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/4428
- Spivak 9y ago
  Yeah, if only there was really simple way to subscribe to many different feeds of syndicated text content.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    still too soon
    - flukus 9y ago
      Google reader may be gone, but RSS still exists, which is what I think the parent is referring to. There doesn't seem to be a shortage of clients.
      - agumonkey 9y ago
        I was referring to the desaffection of the mainstream media toward RSS
        Spivak 9y ago
        It's really rare to find a blog or news outlet that doesn't support RSS/Atom.
        agumonkey 9y ago
        I thought browsers removed the builtin rss subscribe and update though ..
- aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  Text-only CNN was still loading a 200+KB analytics JS file. This NPR page is literally two orders of magnitude smaller.
- roywiggins 9y ago
  These remind me of playing with scraping sites into WAP format back when WAP seemed like a reasonable way to provide information on mobile.
- CephalopodMD 9y ago
  I learned about this site from the comments of that post
- projectant 9y ago
  There's this: https://github.com/textonly/news https://github.com/textonly/news ( and its own 'textonly' version https://raw.githubusercontent.com/textonly/news/master/README.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/textonly/news/master/READM... )
  - sjmulder 9y ago
    I maintain a similar list at https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html Like the GitHub repo it's still very short but I'll add more sites as I find them.
    - projectant 9y ago
      Cool. Or you can contribute as well. Make a pull request!
  - no_news_is 9y ago
    I'm assuming this is yours? If so, typo in your url for the CNN link -- line instead of lite.
    - projectant 9y ago
      Thank you so much!
bdreadz 9y ago
I want more sites to do this. Would be so wonderful.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Totally agree. I hope this starts a trend where the first T in HTTP comes back to prominence.
- ashark 9y ago
  I'd settle for an restricted subset of HTML only as a light standard. Tables and bold and h-tags and stuff are fine, it's CSS and Javascript that slow everything down for (on ordinary pages) basically no benefit. Reserve boxes for images but click/tap to fetch and show. Make always-show an option I guess. Videos are well-marked links that open in some other program. Let the user set some colors and sizes for basic text elements and call it a day. 99% of the web would be better for the user in such a restricted format and we could stop spending so much money peacocking up plain ol' websites.
  - carussell 9y ago
    [This post removed by author]
    - KGIII 9y ago
      If you're going to link to those, you might as well link to the best. https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
      - stan_rogers 9y ago
        It's not. Really. Lower contrast, crowded lines and skinny fonts aren't making things better. FOUC isn't making things better. The larger file(s) required to achieve worse results isn't making things better.
  - roywiggins 9y ago
fairpx 9y ago
These text only approaches are fantastic. In fact, I recently designed the UI for a conceptual Text-only Techcrunch. Feel free to download the files and build something with it. [0]https://hackernoon.com/redesigning-techcrunch-1ecae542e6af?gi=c5d231b776ff https://hackernoon.com/redesigning-techcrunch-1ecae542e6af?g...
jaytaylor 9y ago
After seeing the CNN one and now this, it makes me want to create a generalized service to turn any site into TXT format with the html2text [0] golang package. Will submit to Show HN if I get enough round toits ;) [0] https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text
- astronautjones 9y ago
  here's hoping!
- evantahler 9y ago
  I bet you can use one of the classic text “browsers”, like Lynx, and serve up that output... ...Runs to download Lynx and rediscover the past!
  - l1n 9y ago
    elinks -dump is my poison of choice :)
- KGIII 9y ago
  On a tablet, I sometimes make use of this site: https://www.textise.net/ https://www.textise.net/ It comes in pretty handy sometimes. I'm absolutely not affiliated, just a happy user.
  - fifty_something 9y ago
    Thank you for that. A very useful website.
- rmrfrmrf 9y ago
  Most browsers already have a “reader view”.
- jaytaylor 9y ago
  Here is the first pass; I still want to make it fancier so that links are clickable, but for a quick first stab I'm pleasantly surprised with the output quality: http://txt.gigawatt.io/ http://txt.gigawatt.io/ <-- add URL here at the end (GET parameters not yet supported) Examples: http://txt.gigawatt.io/jaytaylor.com http://txt.gigawatt.io/jaytaylor.com http://txt.gigawatt.io/http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/26/politics/senate-intelligence-committee-russia-facebook-ads/index.html http://txt.gigawatt.io/http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/26/politic... Source code: https://github.com/jaytaylor/txt-web https://github.com/jaytaylor/txt-web
stevewilhelm 9y ago
It would be really cool if websites published their frequently changing information in some kind of text based stream or feed. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(standard)
- Avshalom 9y ago
  Or if there was some way to push those updates. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
- Spivak 9y ago
  Yeah, they could publish syndicated content but it would have to be really simple for non-technical users. I mean the real barriers to entry are that browsers don't display feeds nicely, you need an additional client or service.
- niftich 9y ago
  In fairness NPR does in fact have RSS 2.0 feeds; they're separated by section [1] -- for example, one for US News [2]. There's an 'assorted' feed [3] that doesn't exactly mirror the homepage but shares a similar purpose. The feeds only embed a line or two from the article, and link to the regular (i.e. non-lite) site. Nonetheless, they exist; artifacts of a patchwork of optimistic thinking about the future of the web that have largely fallen out of the collective popular consciousness. [1] https://help.npr.org/customer/portal/articles/2094175-where-can-i-find-npr-rss-feeds- https://help.npr.org/customer/portal/articles/2094175-where-... [2] http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php?id=1003 http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php?id=1003 [3] http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php
ComputerGuru 9y ago
My first, knee-jerk reaction was “God, that loaded fast!” even though I already knew going in what to expect. Text-only doesn’t have to be _ugly_ though. Once you embrace minimalism, you realize that aesthetics are primarily a concept of white space and typography. And neither one of those interferes with text only, thank god. While modern CSS has been inching towards becoming Turing complete (is it already now? I think so long as adding html elements via :before/:after remains disallowed we aren’t there yet?), CSS’ biggest saving grace is that it was a declarative and Turing incomplete. Of course when the web first started, the idea was that it would serve stylable but-unstyled-by-default content _and then the user would style it as they liked_ so they could enjoy a consistent and customized experience no matter what they were browsing. I don’t know many people that still customize their Browser default style sheets (can you even do that in Edge, I wonder?). I personally don’t because I appreciate the value in judging people (and the content they produce) by how they’ve styled it (or haven’t, which can oftentimes be preferable). EDIT OK, with the caveat that I'm not a designer and have been told I haven't an artistic bone in my body, here's what NPR looks like with only some extremely basic CSS applied to html, body, and a elements and no changes to the actual HTML:† https://dev.neosmart.net/npr/1.html https://dev.neosmart.net/npr/1.html And here's what it looks like with no changes to the HTML but with some additional CSS styling applied to the various sections of the document: https://dev.neosmart.net/npr/2.html https://dev.neosmart.net/npr/2.html The focus isn't "design" per se, but merely readability. Less harsh contrast, fonts with better hinting, limiting horizontal eye travel, keeping content from reaching the very edges of the screen on mobile, and making the size of elements (and how much DOM real estate space they take up) match their relative importance. † A charset=utf-8 meta tag was added to the HTML since the NPR document was served without a charset but contained UTF-8 encoded elements (instead of their HTML-encoded counterparts)
- agumonkey 9y ago
  I'm really loving the html3/4 default typo. There are people advocating for "better" typography in raw text documents, but even if it's quite prettier, it's not the point.
- anonfunction 9y ago
  There is no css being loaded on http://thin.npr.org http://thin.npr.org, just the default browser styling for html elements.
matthew349hall 9y ago
The CNN one looked eons better, but thumbs up for speed. Seriously.
astronautjones 9y ago
Hope this trend catches on.
- crispyambulance 9y ago
  It won't. It is ugly and harsh on the eyes. There's nothing wrong with a minimal no-frills aesthetic, but that doesn't have to mean literally ripping _all_ styling out. Hundreds of years of typography, typesetting... and what do some people claim to want? Naked html, default styling like a friggin' typewriter! Ugh!
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    I'll disagree with you. We should be putting our own styling on once it hits our computers. There's no reason that we couldn't design systems so that the client can style it to their preference. Then you get the best of both worlds!
    - chestervonwinch 9y ago
      Exactly. I use this approach all the time on mobile with text-only NPR. I can browse fast over crummy or spotty service, and when I find one that I want to read in depth, I go to reader mode.
    - krapp 9y ago
      >We should be putting our own styling on once it hits our computers. 99.999% of people don't want to design their own custom CSS for every website they visit, though. And the people who do could set custom stylesheets on any site they like. Nothing really needs to change in that regard, the best of both worlds is already here.
      - CaptSpify 9y ago
        but we could make it a lot easier. Imagine FF having a large list of stylesheets to choose from, with a "try it out now!" button or something. Additionally, If every site worked this way, you'd only have to set the stylesheet once.
rsync 9y ago
I wish there was a easy-to-find-downloads-of-audio NPR ... But unfortunately, like almost all media outlets, finding an actual link that points to an actual mp3 file is very time consuming and difficult. Here's an example ... Let's say you want to download an episode of 1-A to listen to on an airplane. The front page of the website[1] has "listen" links and also a "subscribe to the "podcast"" link. But I don't want to "listen" and I don't want to subscribe to anything and I don't use itunes (or anything like itunes). So you click the link to the actual episode of the show[2] but once again ... cute little "listen" link ... cute little "discuss" link ... but no way to download a file. So now it's getting frustrating ... but as a last ditch effort, you turn off your brain and just type in "download 1-a episode" into google and come up with this link[3] which takes you to a different website (npr.org) which has a list of 1-a episodes (and our friend the "listen" button) but also has a cute little "..." button that expands into choices, one of which is "download". [1] http://the1a.org/ http://the1a.org/ [2] http://the1a.org/shows/2017-09-25/salman-rushdie http://the1a.org/shows/2017-09-25/salman-rushdie [3] http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510316/1a http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510316/1a
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- fao_ 9y ago
  (You can follow along on this page: http://the1a.org/audio/#/shows/2017-09-25/salman-rushdie/ http://the1a.org/audio/#/shows/2017-09-25/salman-rushdie/) In the developer tools inspector, select the audio player and search for `div#external_player`, right click > "expand all", and there should be an "<audio>" tag. The `src` attribute of that contains the mp3 that you want.
  - mintplant 9y ago
    The Audio Downloader Prime [0] add-on for Firefox automates this task. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/audio-downloader-prime/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/audio-downloa...
  - KGIII 9y ago
agumonkey 9y ago
Oh it's not even new, see https://www.reddit.com/r/minimalism/comments/zuj0o/nprs_textonly_website/ https://www.reddit.com/r/minimalism/comments/zuj0o/nprs_text... it was included in this list http://www.lesswaiting.com/info118.html http://www.lesswaiting.com/info118.html That might be outdated since the comment is 5 years old.
ruok0101 9y ago
"online version of our monotone news reporting". j/k. I love it.
- Decabytes 9y ago
  I've always loved minimalist websites and text. Typography was my favorite style in my graphic design classes. Like Pixel Art I feel like these things can be implemented very well but get a bad rap for being "retro" or "dated".
loxias 9y ago
This looks glorious in w3m. Thank you NPR!
- Endy 9y ago
  Looks great in Links too!
leggomylibro 9y ago
Funny that it still has javascript. Just a tiny scroll-up function, but still funny.
- flukus 9y ago
  If I'm interpreting the javascript properly, it looks like it breaks the back button by forcing you to the top of the page.
  - ameliaquining 9y ago
    No, the JavaScript has nothing to do with scrolling. Rather, it checks whether it's inside an iframe, and if so, navigates the top-level window to its own URL. In other words, it prevents you from embedding the site; if you try, your page will instead redirect to it. However, in the modern era, this kind of measure is neither necessary (because you can block iframing with CSP) nor effective (because the parent page can sandbox the iframe).
tejasmanohar 9y ago
It would be cool if there was a standard to identify the text only version of a site so your browser could just prefer that.
- jayflux 9y ago
  .txt Tld?
  - indiv0 9y ago
    You'd probably want it as a subdomain instead of requiring people to register 2 domains to support a thin version.
mikeytown2 9y ago
NPR: 100,100 [1] CNN: 89,95 [2] NPR's is better than any amp page according to Google pagespeed insights. [1] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fthin.npr.org%2F https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [2] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flite.cnn.io%2Fen https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
jason_slack 9y ago
Oh the nostalgia. The year was 1994 and I was a sophomore in high school. I downloaded Netscape via an FTP connection on my Macintosh LCIII. I opened it up and um, where do I go? What do I do? All webpages were text like this at the time. I feel like it was efficient. You brought up a page and you read it. Now-a-days, for me, excessive graphics and bright colors distract from the content of the page.
- asciimo 9y ago
  Same. Yet it felt like a revolutionary innovation when I loaded NPR's in my browser.
napa15 9y ago
You know what, I really like this. Even with a site like drudgereport which is kind of text-like, it still feels like it's screaming at you. This is how news should be to allow me to form my own opinions in my head. The presentation might be slightly better with a google like description text underneath, could be that I'm used to that though.
panarky 9y ago
The ultimate single-page app. They're still 107 characters away from purity, though: <script> if (window != top) { top.location.href = location.href; } </script>
isthisnagee 9y ago
I really love these text-only minimalist news sites (http://lite.cnn.io http://lite.cnn.io, as another example). I read the thin NPR and lite CNN almost daily, and I'd love to see a list of these for other big news sites. By far my favorite thing to do with them is customize them. I have a tiny plugin that styles the pages so that they are visually consistent, and I "fixed" the link issues in the articles so that when you click "Get the full experience", it takes you to the article's full version, instead of the home page of the regular site.
- thoughtpalette 9y ago
  I wish they would've went with the same subdomain. I'd love if the lite.* subdomain caught on.
greggarious 9y ago
So they had time for this but still haven't rolled out HTTPS?
- throwahey 9y ago
  Can someone explain to me why a news website needs HTTPS? Barring pages that require entry of financial information, why would you need to encrypt this kind of traffic? Is people snooping on what news articles you read a real concern? Genuine question here.
  - greggarious 9y ago
    HTTPS provides integrity checks as well as encryption. Would you want someone between you and the site modifying it's contents in transit? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations#QUANTUM_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations#QUA...
  - bradbatt 9y ago
    So ISPs and government entities and others can't see what you're reading.
    - kxyvr 9y ago
      Here's a longer answer at superuser: https://superuser.com/questions/563851/how-isp-sees-the-https-traffic https://superuser.com/questions/563851/how-isp-sees-the-http... But, yes, since ISPs may be getting into the business of analyzing and selling our browsing habits, https limits the amount of information that they see such as what particular page is viewed on a site. Certainly, that doesn't stop other ways to track, but it's a reasonable one.
- beyondthezero 9y ago
  thin.npr.org has been around for some time (2000s) and if my knowledge is correct even mentioned on HN once or twice before. As for https, it's coming soon ;)
tobinfricke 9y ago
Reminds me of gopher. :-)
nishs 9y ago
Chrome extension that makes tiny (but worthwhile!) usability improvements to the already great site: https://github.com/nishanths/thin-npr https://github.com/nishanths/thin-npr * Opens stories in expanded mode upon opening. No need to click on the "Read more..." link each time. * Clicking the "text-only" footer link from regular npr.org attempts to go to the corresponding thin page, instead of the thin.npr.org front page. * Articles have smaller line-widths for easier reading.
schuke 9y ago
It's interesting that I have to very consciously and deliberately tell my mind that this page is very new, the stories are very new. Somehow my mind just very strongly believes this is a legacy site.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
feelin_googley 9y ago
Text-only NYT test $# -eq 1 ||exec echo usage: $0 section \> news.htm a="GET /services/json/sectionfronts/$1/index.jsonp HTTP/1.1"; b="User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/44.0.2403.89 Safari/537.36"; c="Host: static01.nyt.com"; d="Connection: close"; exec printf "%s\r\n%s\r\n%s\r\n%s\r\n\r\n" "$a" "$b" "$c" "$d" \ |exec openssl s_client -tls1_2 -ign_eof -connect static01.nyt.com:443 -servername static01.nyt.com -tlsextdebug -verify 9 \ |exec tr -cd '\12\40-\176' \ |exec sed -n ' /link\" :/{s/.* : \"//;s/\",//;s/.*/<a href=&>&<\/a><\/pre>/;}; /title\" :/{s/ > / Section: /; s/.* : \"/<br><pre>/; s/\",//;}; /lastBuildDate\" :/{s/.* : \"/<pre>/; s/\",//; s/\\n/<\/pre>/;}; /pre>/p; '
cup-of-tea 9y ago
So what any website should look like if the user disables the stylesheet?
ubik 9y ago
I wish more sites would have these text-only fallback modes and that it was standard practice. A tiny bit of css wouldn't hurt though.
Fnoord 9y ago
Just strikes me, immediately apparent: Whats With All The Capitals In Headlines? German influence?
advanced__pizza 9y ago
I like this site and the flat cnn site so I built this: http://flatreader.herokuapp.com/ http://flatreader.herokuapp.com/ I would love to grab article text, and display with no images, but I'm fairly sure that violates redistribution laws. Any ideas on features would be greatly appreciated. Cheers.

504 points by mrzool 9y ago

There was recently a post about text-only CNN too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15210022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15210022 If there are more text-only versions of sites, it seems like it may be cool to add a meta-view service in the style of HN or reddit. Is there an extant service that would easily allow this?

akira2501 9y ago
> If there are more text-only versions of sites I might have a reason to install lynx again.
- ComputerGuru 9y ago
  Ugh. I literally just spent several hours adding a workaround to fish shell that addresses a bug in Lynx that’s been around forever that randomly makes html content unreadable [0]. And that was only possible after a lot of research and digging! How hard do you have to try to screw up the rendering of text only HTML? It turns out that lynx applies styles (foreground color + optional background color + optional underline) to rendered documents (so you can tell where a link is, mainly) by calculating the hash of the (HTML element name, class) tuple of each DOM member (probably supporting just one class per element). It turns out that the insanely popular `<div class="contents"></div>` element has a hash that collides with that of `em.a` (a link in emphasized text) which styles the link to become readable in the default styling applied to `em`... but due to that collision, `<div class="contents"></div>` elements, not having the default <em> styling applied to them, become entirely unreadably (black on dark blue). Lynx uses a very primitive hashing function (with a very small address space), and then (out of negligence or in the name of performance? Who knows!) doesn't check if the the (element, class) tuple (not its hash, but the actual tuple) matches that defined in the stylesheet... To make matters worse, doxygen (arguably the most popular open source documentation generation software) generates the HTML versions of its output with all the content in a div assigned a class called.... yup, you guessed it, `contents`. And that's where fish and my workaround came in :) [0]: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/4428 https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/4428
Spivak 9y ago
Yeah, if only there was really simple way to subscribe to many different feeds of syndicated text content.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  still too soon
  - flukus 9y ago
    Google reader may be gone, but RSS still exists, which is what I think the parent is referring to. There doesn't seem to be a shortage of clients.
    - agumonkey 9y ago
      I was referring to the desaffection of the mainstream media toward RSS
      - Spivak 9y ago
        It's really rare to find a blog or news outlet that doesn't support RSS/Atom.
        agumonkey 9y ago
        I thought browsers removed the builtin rss subscribe and update though ..
aaronbrethorst 9y ago
Text-only CNN was still loading a 200+KB analytics JS file. This NPR page is literally two orders of magnitude smaller.
roywiggins 9y ago
These remind me of playing with scraping sites into WAP format back when WAP seemed like a reasonable way to provide information on mobile.
CephalopodMD 9y ago
I learned about this site from the comments of that post
projectant 9y ago
There's this: https://github.com/textonly/news https://github.com/textonly/news ( and its own 'textonly' version https://raw.githubusercontent.com/textonly/news/master/README.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/textonly/news/master/READM... )
- sjmulder 9y ago
  I maintain a similar list at https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html Like the GitHub repo it's still very short but I'll add more sites as I find them.
  - projectant 9y ago
    Cool. Or you can contribute as well. Make a pull request!
- no_news_is 9y ago
  I'm assuming this is yours? If so, typo in your url for the CNN link -- line instead of lite.
  - projectant 9y ago
    Thank you so much!

bdreadz 9y ago

I want more sites to do this. Would be so wonderful.

ryandrake 9y ago
Totally agree. I hope this starts a trend where the first T in HTTP comes back to prominence.
ashark 9y ago
I'd settle for an restricted subset of HTML only as a light standard. Tables and bold and h-tags and stuff are fine, it's CSS and Javascript that slow everything down for (on ordinary pages) basically no benefit. Reserve boxes for images but click/tap to fetch and show. Make always-show an option I guess. Videos are well-marked links that open in some other program. Let the user set some colors and sizes for basic text elements and call it a day. 99% of the web would be better for the user in such a restricted format and we could stop spending so much money peacocking up plain ol' websites.
- carussell 9y ago
  [This post removed by author]
  - KGIII 9y ago
    If you're going to link to those, you might as well link to the best. https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
    - stan_rogers 9y ago
      It's not. Really. Lower contrast, crowded lines and skinny fonts aren't making things better. FOUC isn't making things better. The larger file(s) required to achieve worse results isn't making things better.
- roywiggins 9y ago

fairpx 9y ago

These text only approaches are fantastic. In fact, I recently designed the UI for a conceptual Text-only Techcrunch. Feel free to download the files and build something with it. [0]https://hackernoon.com/redesigning-techcrunch-1ecae542e6af?gi=c5d231b776ff https://hackernoon.com/redesigning-techcrunch-1ecae542e6af?g...

jaytaylor 9y ago

After seeing the CNN one and now this, it makes me want to create a generalized service to turn any site into TXT format with the html2text [0] golang package. Will submit to Show HN if I get enough round toits ;) [0] https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text

astronautjones 9y ago
here's hoping!
evantahler 9y ago
I bet you can use one of the classic text “browsers”, like Lynx, and serve up that output... ...Runs to download Lynx and rediscover the past!
- l1n 9y ago
  elinks -dump is my poison of choice :)
KGIII 9y ago
On a tablet, I sometimes make use of this site: https://www.textise.net/ https://www.textise.net/ It comes in pretty handy sometimes. I'm absolutely not affiliated, just a happy user.
- fifty_something 9y ago
  Thank you for that. A very useful website.
rmrfrmrf 9y ago
Most browsers already have a “reader view”.
jaytaylor 9y ago
Here is the first pass; I still want to make it fancier so that links are clickable, but for a quick first stab I'm pleasantly surprised with the output quality: http://txt.gigawatt.io/ http://txt.gigawatt.io/ <-- add URL here at the end (GET parameters not yet supported) Examples: http://txt.gigawatt.io/jaytaylor.com http://txt.gigawatt.io/jaytaylor.com http://txt.gigawatt.io/http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/26/politics/senate-intelligence-committee-russia-facebook-ads/index.html http://txt.gigawatt.io/http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/26/politic... Source code: https://github.com/jaytaylor/txt-web https://github.com/jaytaylor/txt-web

stevewilhelm 9y ago

It would be really cool if websites published their frequently changing information in some kind of text based stream or feed. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(standard)

Avshalom 9y ago
Or if there was some way to push those updates. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
Spivak 9y ago
Yeah, they could publish syndicated content but it would have to be really simple for non-technical users. I mean the real barriers to entry are that browsers don't display feeds nicely, you need an additional client or service.
niftich 9y ago
In fairness NPR does in fact have RSS 2.0 feeds; they're separated by section [1] -- for example, one for US News [2]. There's an 'assorted' feed [3] that doesn't exactly mirror the homepage but shares a similar purpose. The feeds only embed a line or two from the article, and link to the regular (i.e. non-lite) site. Nonetheless, they exist; artifacts of a patchwork of optimistic thinking about the future of the web that have largely fallen out of the collective popular consciousness. [1] https://help.npr.org/customer/portal/articles/2094175-where-can-i-find-npr-rss-feeds- https://help.npr.org/customer/portal/articles/2094175-where-... [2] http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php?id=1003 http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php?id=1003 [3] http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php

ComputerGuru 9y ago

My first, knee-jerk reaction was “God, that loaded fast!” even though I already knew going in what to expect. Text-only doesn’t have to be _ugly_ though. Once you embrace minimalism, you realize that aesthetics are primarily a concept of white space and typography. And neither one of those interferes with text only, thank god. While modern CSS has been inching towards becoming Turing complete (is it already now? I think so long as adding html elements via :before/:after remains disallowed we aren’t there yet?), CSS’ biggest saving grace is that it was a declarative and Turing incomplete. Of course when the web first started, the idea was that it would serve stylable but-unstyled-by-default content _and then the user would style it as they liked_ so they could enjoy a consistent and customized experience no matter what they were browsing. I don’t know many people that still customize their Browser default style sheets (can you even do that in Edge, I wonder?). I personally don’t because I appreciate the value in judging people (and the content they produce) by how they’ve styled it (or haven’t, which can oftentimes be preferable). EDIT OK, with the caveat that I'm not a designer and have been told I haven't an artistic bone in my body, here's what NPR looks like with only some extremely basic CSS applied to html, body, and a elements and no changes to the actual HTML:† https://dev.neosmart.net/npr/1.html https://dev.neosmart.net/npr/1.html And here's what it looks like with no changes to the HTML but with some additional CSS styling applied to the various sections of the document: https://dev.neosmart.net/npr/2.html https://dev.neosmart.net/npr/2.html The focus isn't "design" per se, but merely readability. Less harsh contrast, fonts with better hinting, limiting horizontal eye travel, keeping content from reaching the very edges of the screen on mobile, and making the size of elements (and how much DOM real estate space they take up) match their relative importance. † A charset=utf-8 meta tag was added to the HTML since the NPR document was served without a charset but contained UTF-8 encoded elements (instead of their HTML-encoded counterparts)

agumonkey 9y ago
I'm really loving the html3/4 default typo. There are people advocating for "better" typography in raw text documents, but even if it's quite prettier, it's not the point.
anonfunction 9y ago
There is no css being loaded on http://thin.npr.org http://thin.npr.org, just the default browser styling for html elements.

matthew349hall 9y ago

The CNN one looked eons better, but thumbs up for speed. Seriously.

astronautjones 9y ago

Hope this trend catches on.

crispyambulance 9y ago
It won't. It is ugly and harsh on the eyes. There's nothing wrong with a minimal no-frills aesthetic, but that doesn't have to mean literally ripping _all_ styling out. Hundreds of years of typography, typesetting... and what do some people claim to want? Naked html, default styling like a friggin' typewriter! Ugh!
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  I'll disagree with you. We should be putting our own styling on once it hits our computers. There's no reason that we couldn't design systems so that the client can style it to their preference. Then you get the best of both worlds!
  - chestervonwinch 9y ago
    Exactly. I use this approach all the time on mobile with text-only NPR. I can browse fast over crummy or spotty service, and when I find one that I want to read in depth, I go to reader mode.
  - krapp 9y ago
    >We should be putting our own styling on once it hits our computers. 99.999% of people don't want to design their own custom CSS for every website they visit, though. And the people who do could set custom stylesheets on any site they like. Nothing really needs to change in that regard, the best of both worlds is already here.
    - CaptSpify 9y ago
      but we could make it a lot easier. Imagine FF having a large list of stylesheets to choose from, with a "try it out now!" button or something. Additionally, If every site worked this way, you'd only have to set the stylesheet once.

rsync 9y ago

I wish there was a easy-to-find-downloads-of-audio NPR ... But unfortunately, like almost all media outlets, finding an actual link that points to an actual mp3 file is very time consuming and difficult. Here's an example ... Let's say you want to download an episode of 1-A to listen to on an airplane. The front page of the website[1] has "listen" links and also a "subscribe to the "podcast"" link. But I don't want to "listen" and I don't want to subscribe to anything and I don't use itunes (or anything like itunes). So you click the link to the actual episode of the show[2] but once again ... cute little "listen" link ... cute little "discuss" link ... but no way to download a file. So now it's getting frustrating ... but as a last ditch effort, you turn off your brain and just type in "download 1-a episode" into google and come up with this link[3] which takes you to a different website (npr.org) which has a list of 1-a episodes (and our friend the "listen" button) but also has a cute little "..." button that expands into choices, one of which is "download". [1] http://the1a.org/ http://the1a.org/ [2] http://the1a.org/shows/2017-09-25/salman-rushdie http://the1a.org/shows/2017-09-25/salman-rushdie [3] http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510316/1a http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510316/1a

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
fao_ 9y ago
(You can follow along on this page: http://the1a.org/audio/#/shows/2017-09-25/salman-rushdie/ http://the1a.org/audio/#/shows/2017-09-25/salman-rushdie/) In the developer tools inspector, select the audio player and search for `div#external_player`, right click > "expand all", and there should be an "<audio>" tag. The `src` attribute of that contains the mp3 that you want.
- mintplant 9y ago
  The Audio Downloader Prime [0] add-on for Firefox automates this task. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/audio-downloader-prime/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/audio-downloa...
- KGIII 9y ago

agumonkey 9y ago

Oh it's not even new, see https://www.reddit.com/r/minimalism/comments/zuj0o/nprs_textonly_website/ https://www.reddit.com/r/minimalism/comments/zuj0o/nprs_text... it was included in this list http://www.lesswaiting.com/info118.html http://www.lesswaiting.com/info118.html That might be outdated since the comment is 5 years old.

ruok0101 9y ago

"online version of our monotone news reporting". j/k. I love it.

Decabytes 9y ago
I've always loved minimalist websites and text. Typography was my favorite style in my graphic design classes. Like Pixel Art I feel like these things can be implemented very well but get a bad rap for being "retro" or "dated".

loxias 9y ago

This looks glorious in w3m. Thank you NPR!

Endy 9y ago
Looks great in Links too!

leggomylibro 9y ago

Funny that it still has javascript. Just a tiny scroll-up function, but still funny.

flukus 9y ago
If I'm interpreting the javascript properly, it looks like it breaks the back button by forcing you to the top of the page.
- ameliaquining 9y ago
  No, the JavaScript has nothing to do with scrolling. Rather, it checks whether it's inside an iframe, and if so, navigates the top-level window to its own URL. In other words, it prevents you from embedding the site; if you try, your page will instead redirect to it. However, in the modern era, this kind of measure is neither necessary (because you can block iframing with CSP) nor effective (because the parent page can sandbox the iframe).

tejasmanohar 9y ago

It would be cool if there was a standard to identify the text only version of a site so your browser could just prefer that.

jayflux 9y ago
.txt Tld?
- indiv0 9y ago
  You'd probably want it as a subdomain instead of requiring people to register 2 domains to support a thin version.

mikeytown2 9y ago

NPR: 100,100 [1] CNN: 89,95 [2] NPR's is better than any amp page according to Google pagespeed insights. [1] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fthin.npr.org%2F https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [2] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flite.cnn.io%2Fen https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

jason_slack 9y ago

Oh the nostalgia. The year was 1994 and I was a sophomore in high school. I downloaded Netscape via an FTP connection on my Macintosh LCIII. I opened it up and um, where do I go? What do I do? All webpages were text like this at the time. I feel like it was efficient. You brought up a page and you read it. Now-a-days, for me, excessive graphics and bright colors distract from the content of the page.

asciimo 9y ago
Same. Yet it felt like a revolutionary innovation when I loaded NPR's in my browser.

napa15 9y ago

You know what, I really like this. Even with a site like drudgereport which is kind of text-like, it still feels like it's screaming at you. This is how news should be to allow me to form my own opinions in my head. The presentation might be slightly better with a google like description text underneath, could be that I'm used to that though.

panarky 9y ago

The ultimate single-page app. They're still 107 characters away from purity, though: <script> if (window != top) { top.location.href = location.href; } </script>

isthisnagee 9y ago

I really love these text-only minimalist news sites (http://lite.cnn.io http://lite.cnn.io, as another example). I read the thin NPR and lite CNN almost daily, and I'd love to see a list of these for other big news sites. By far my favorite thing to do with them is customize them. I have a tiny plugin that styles the pages so that they are visually consistent, and I "fixed" the link issues in the articles so that when you click "Get the full experience", it takes you to the article's full version, instead of the home page of the regular site.

thoughtpalette 9y ago
I wish they would've went with the same subdomain. I'd love if the lite.* subdomain caught on.

greggarious 9y ago

So they had time for this but still haven't rolled out HTTPS?

throwahey 9y ago
Can someone explain to me why a news website needs HTTPS? Barring pages that require entry of financial information, why would you need to encrypt this kind of traffic? Is people snooping on what news articles you read a real concern? Genuine question here.
- greggarious 9y ago
  HTTPS provides integrity checks as well as encryption. Would you want someone between you and the site modifying it's contents in transit? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations#QUANTUM_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations#QUA...
- bradbatt 9y ago
  So ISPs and government entities and others can't see what you're reading.
  - kxyvr 9y ago
    Here's a longer answer at superuser: https://superuser.com/questions/563851/how-isp-sees-the-https-traffic https://superuser.com/questions/563851/how-isp-sees-the-http... But, yes, since ISPs may be getting into the business of analyzing and selling our browsing habits, https limits the amount of information that they see such as what particular page is viewed on a site. Certainly, that doesn't stop other ways to track, but it's a reasonable one.
beyondthezero 9y ago
thin.npr.org has been around for some time (2000s) and if my knowledge is correct even mentioned on HN once or twice before. As for https, it's coming soon ;)

tobinfricke 9y ago

Reminds me of gopher. :-)

nishs 9y ago

Chrome extension that makes tiny (but worthwhile!) usability improvements to the already great site: https://github.com/nishanths/thin-npr https://github.com/nishanths/thin-npr * Opens stories in expanded mode upon opening. No need to click on the "Read more..." link each time. * Clicking the "text-only" footer link from regular npr.org attempts to go to the corresponding thin page, instead of the thin.npr.org front page. * Articles have smaller line-widths for easier reading.

schuke 9y ago

It's interesting that I have to very consciously and deliberately tell my mind that this page is very new, the stories are very new. Somehow my mind just very strongly believes this is a legacy site.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

feelin_googley 9y ago

Text-only NYT test $# -eq 1 ||exec echo usage: $0 section \> news.htm a="GET /services/json/sectionfronts/$1/index.jsonp HTTP/1.1"; b="User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/44.0.2403.89 Safari/537.36"; c="Host: static01.nyt.com"; d="Connection: close"; exec printf "%s\r\n%s\r\n%s\r\n%s\r\n\r\n" "$a" "$b" "$c" "$d" \ |exec openssl s_client -tls1_2 -ign_eof -connect static01.nyt.com:443 -servername static01.nyt.com -tlsextdebug -verify 9 \ |exec tr -cd '\12\40-\176' \ |exec sed -n ' /link\" :/{s/.* : \"//;s/\",//;s/.*/<a href=&>&<\/a><\/pre>/;}; /title\" :/{s/ > / Section: /; s/.* : \"/<br><pre>/; s/\",//;}; /lastBuildDate\" :/{s/.* : \"/<pre>/; s/\",//; s/\\n/<\/pre>/;}; /pre>/p; '

cup-of-tea 9y ago

So what any website should look like if the user disables the stylesheet?

ubik 9y ago

I wish more sites would have these text-only fallback modes and that it was standard practice. A tiny bit of css wouldn't hurt though.

Fnoord 9y ago

Just strikes me, immediately apparent: Whats With All The Capitals In Headlines? German influence?

advanced__pizza 9y ago

I like this site and the flat cnn site so I built this: http://flatreader.herokuapp.com/ http://flatreader.herokuapp.com/ I would love to grab article text, and display with no images, but I'm fairly sure that violates redistribution laws. Any ideas on features would be greatly appreciated. Cheers.