11 ms·

Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

259 points by georgecmu 9y ago

nasredin 9y ago
TLDR: to prevent DoS in case of natural and man made disasters: hurricanes, terrorist attacks.
pwaai 9y ago
> Bowden: Text in HTML is the way to go here; you cover accessibility issues and SEO bots, while simultaneously also being usable on the maximum number of devices possible. HTML and CSS are forgiving in the sense that you can make mistakes in them, and something will still be rendered to the user. Browsers are built with backwards compatibility, so combining them all grants you the extended coverage. Meaning that basic sites will work on nearly any phone. Any computer. Any browser. So many modern javascript heavy websites that are pain to build, pain to index, pain to maintain, pain to download and consume, painful to support older devices. We got here because it was trendy...and now we've come to a full circle.
- endemic 9y ago
  From a pragmatic perspective: adding a level of interactivity via JavaScript requires a lot of work and/or $$$. Text content Just Works.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    And think of disabled people who use screen readers and similarly limited interfaces. A simple text-based website works so much better with these tools than a JS and AJAX abomination.
agumonkey 9y ago
These are fine technical reasons. I'll add some human ones: - vanilla html webpages had way more actual content [1] - they don't burden you with updates, social sharing [1] nowadays very often you run into a site with header, menu, flashing area, related articles, footer, cookie warning, etc etc. In the middle of all this you can barely see the first paragraph. And when you scroll down you realize there's only two of them. html5/css3 improved the wrong factors, or at least gave people the wrong idea about where to spend time
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  Also - text only automatically involves a standard that avoids bloat of all kinds. Once a graphic webpage has traffic but isn't a front-runner, there's a temptation to keep adding more little graphic pieces of crap that slowly the site becomes completely unusable - see slashdot and yahoo.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    you know it got to a point where, and I've read other people say it; whenever I run into an html4 days webpage, I feel all relaxed. I know there's gonna be zero shitty tricks to monetize anything. Even a crappy geocities page feels better.
- borplk 9y ago
  You scroll down a bit, an obnoxious overlay jumps out "GET THE BEST TIPS IN YOUR EMAIL" ... with an even more obnoxious cancel button "No I'm dumb and don't want the best tips in my email". Then as you attempt to exit the tab the "exit intent" crap kicks in "NOOOO don't go!". Sometimes I miss the days when no one cared about the internet.
  - tannhaeuser 9y ago
    You forgot the "DOWNLOAD OUR APP FOR (whatever reason)" part, the app being a custom browser. Though, apart from Ajax, HTML5 lacks a simple way to compose markup at the browser side, thereby avoiding full page reloads, like SGML had over 30 years ago ([2]). HTML imports are basically dead, and weren't great or widely used to begin with ([1]). [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/HTML_Imports https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/... [2]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/templating.html http://sgmljs.net/docs/templating.html (my project to bring back markup technologies to the Web)
- pwaai 9y ago
  I miss the 90s web I used to browse with Netscape Navigator. I really liked static navigation menus where I didn't have to stop and infer the functionalities from an icon or hidden expendable/scrolling menus. I made my first website with it when I was 11 (still have it on a cd rom)...it was so simple to use. In fact, a lot of stuff in the late 90s to the early 2000s were very approachable as a curious noob. I started tinkering with QBASIC during 1997 on an old 286 with a monochrome monitor (still have it), and when I got a Windows computer and I tried to make a Warez site on Geocities lol....manually searching altavista for 50mb rar parts compressing Playstation ISO images on a 56k modem, hosted on myspace.com (when it used to be a file storage)...it took all summer to compile but again everything was easier because people didn't give a shit what the site looked like, they just cared about what they could get for free. Now it seems impossible to get away without some trendy UI framework or experts reminding us how we are doing it wrong...which ironically increased the webpage filesize to 196kbps mp3 files that works on modern devices.
gmu3 9y ago
Hate it or love it the drudge report remains one of the most powerful sites on the internet
wjdp 9y ago
Minorly ironic the rest of the article about accessible text only content is hidden behind a non-functional (for me, currently) 'Read More' button.
- BenjiWiebe 9y ago
  Non-functional for me as well. :(
  - jwilk 9y ago
    Try the archived copy: https://archive.is/YtQ4b https://archive.is/YtQ4b
niftich 9y ago
"Lite" versions of news sites are a smart compromise between two competing forces: the desire to appeal to audiences that are put off by garish, heavyweight sites, and to do so in a way that doesn't endanger the revenue they get from all the trackers and advertising on their fat sites. By making the text-only version a separate destination, most of their traffic still flows to their multimedia site by default and by habit. The light version is always advertised by them for specific use-cases only: quick access in emergencies and for usage in "emerging markets" (inaccurate marketing-speak for low-bandwidth connections on low-power devices). The market forces behind text-only news sites are not unlike those behind AMP links, Facebook Instant Articles, and the Apple News app. News sites want their news to be read, but not at the cost of not getting paid. It's a difficult problem to solve, and these "secondary" text sites typically get the content in front of the most ad-averse eyeballs anyway, so they're not currently a threat.
wheresmyusern 9y ago
there is a huge problem with browsers right now -- they are very complicated and big and therefore their development is monopolized by three large organizations, leading to browsers that dont adhere to the best interests of the users. and yet, as this article demonstrates, much of the internet does not require any of the complicated machinery in modern browsers. we have seen our culture, the worlds culture, adopt computers and the internet. gaming, social media, all kinds of media distributed over the internet -- we have grown into the internet. and with this development, we are fast approaching a platou, a period of maturity where it is clear what exactly the internet is used for by most people in most cases, and also (critically) how those uses are implemented. when the internet was born, we made browsers with a turing complete language built in and we made all the tools very general, all because we didnt know what was going to happen. we had to be ready for anything. this is simply not true anymore. off the cuff, the internet is used for reading forums, reading news, watching video and listening to music. perhaps a new kind of browser can be adopted that has those things baked in and nothing else. this kind of browser would meet most of peoples needs while being simple enough to make competition possible, thus aligning these new browsers with the interests of users. these browsers would be much, much safer as well. for other kind of websites, sophisticated web apps that allow you to interface with a service, like email or time clocking or whatever, perhaps those things could be branched off into a new area where js, wasm and binary distribution live. perhaps a different class of browsers. with these kinds of browsers, there is more pressure to align with users interests because users can soft-boycott them because 90 percent of their needs are met by the simpler browsers mentioned earlier. and perhaps a new standard for interfacing with documents can be baked into these new simpler browsers to further take necessity and power away from js and wasm browsers. for things like emails, remote document manipulation, assignment submissions, etc, a lot of that could be fit into a standard that is baked into the browser instead of being re-implemented in js for every instance. a new class of simple browsers would create a new division of the internet that is clean, fast, simple and worry free much like these text only news sites. if one could bake payment into the browser as well, creating the most friction-less payment experience on the internet ever seen, we could see a re-vitalization like that seen with patreon all over again.
- slig 9y ago
rayiner 9y ago
Click through some of the CNN or NPR links to an article. It’s a thing of beauty.
- 0x445442 9y ago
  Yeah this is so timely. I've been lamenting lately about the UI train wreck that is the current status of the web and about how it's nothing but a massive direct marketing platform.
- tuxracer 9y ago
  For some reason they didn't link to the HTTPS versions: https://lite.cnn.io/en https://lite.cnn.io/en https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/
vinspee 9y ago
I’d also point out https://tiny.ted.com/ https://tiny.ted.com/ - a (mostly) text version of TED. It defaults to the full transcript of talks.
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
NoScript+images off turns many sites into low bandwidth text.
taeric 9y ago
I want this to be true. But I highly doubt it will stay. :( Would be really neat to see numbers supporting that this is more than just a few fringe people being served. I've recently started using an RSS reader again and I'm finding that I can find some feeds, but what I don't know where to find is a good place to discuss the articles. More, it does feel like the feeds are a second class citizen, at best. Is amusing to see the page that lists some feeds, such as https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fear-not-readers-we-have-rss-feeds/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fear-not-readers-we-hav... still list the demise of google reader. Which, sadly, reminds me that I haven't checked google+ is about as long.
jswizzy 9y ago
Drudge is a pretty good case study in minimalistic design. By most metrics it's ugly and even baroque but it's brilliant because it is easy to parse and gets to the meat of the narrative that Matt is trying to sell to his audience.
- kakarot 9y ago
  I've always been extremely impressed with Drudge's design. It's quick, easy to maintain, and has been completely mobile optimized since the flip-phone days. It is built around showing you information, instead of information being an excuse to show you ads. Matt understands what he is providing and that insemination of information is more valuable than any extreme monetization strategies. It doesn't have a confusing landscape of sections, icon fonts, ad videos and promotional content that prevent newcomers from understanding the flow. It takes but a few clicks before you are intimate with the interface. It is the quintessential "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" I just wish there were more publications of this style that weren't hyper-conservative and biased. For another example of a beautifully designed site that puts information first, look at Cryptome. https://cryptome.org/ https://cryptome.org/
akras14 9y ago
I wrote a simple RSS feed viewer for myself for the same reason. A lot of times I just want to read the headlines from top news sites. https://www.alexkras.com/eznews/ https://www.alexkras.com/eznews/ If I am actually interested in the story I don’t mind waiting a bit for it to load.
- nooyurrsdey 9y ago
  This is great! Any chance you have the source code for this handy somewhere? Edit: Never mind, found it linked from your blog! For anyone else looking: https://github.com/akras14/eznews/blob/master/index.php https://github.com/akras14/eznews/blob/master/index.php Nice work!
  - akras14 9y ago
    Thanks, Here is the blog post to go with it: Simple RSS Reader in 85 Lines of PHP - https://www.alexkras.com/simple-rss-reader-in-85-lines-of-php/ https://www.alexkras.com/simple-rss-reader-in-85-lines-of-ph...
- gunnihinn 9y ago
  Nice. I did the same a couple of months ago: http://www.magnusson.io/evil-feed-reader http://www.magnusson.io/evil-feed-reader It does very little, but exactly what I want.
- unicornporn 9y ago
  There's also http://simplepie.org/ http://simplepie.org/ for those who don't wish to roll their own.
kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
By all means today's content websites are an abomination, but I don't see why we need to throw the baby out with the bath water by completely rejecting any attempt at styling websites and going back on all readability best practices. I see a lot of websites now which, in an attempt to reject all the nonsense, end up rejecting even basic CSS, and you are subjected to browser width text in Times New Roman with ugly blue underlined links (danluu.com is a good example. Such great content that I love to read but, to be honest, ugly). Surely there is a middle ground? Something as simple as the following can make your website look neat and readable: body { font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; max-width: 800px; margin: 0 auto; } a { text-decoration: none; } Some very very minimal frameworks like Sakura attempt to do just that (https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura)
- feelin_googley 9y ago
  danluu.com looks great in my text-only browser. No Times New Roman, no blue underlined links. Maybe the problem is with your browser?
- nerflad 9y ago
  I read Dan's website in Firefox Reader View. It's great. I love the plaintext web but I agree some better default styling wouldn't hurt.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  I personally think a better approach is to hand out fully un-stylized sites, and provide a recommended CSS for people to apply client-side. That way the client can adjust things more consistently to how they find it easier to read.
  - bartread 9y ago
    The problem with that approach is it will only appeal to power-users. "Normal" people just don't care. My mum, my step-dad, my brother and his fiancee, my next door neighbours, my best friend and my worst enemy all have this in common: they go to a website and they want to see the content on the page. They don't care why or how, so they're never going to apply an optional CSS file, even in the unlikely event they understand what it is. Sorry, that's not meant to come off as a brutal put-down: it's just the way most people are about the web.
kibrad 9y ago
one of the main reasons is that people feel more comfortable accessing text only sites at work
gnicholas 9y ago
For those interested in the accessibility side of news apps, I did a survey [1] of many popular news apps and their text accessibility features. The general trend was that news outlets generally offer some text accessibility settings, and big tech company apps did not offer any text settings at all. My conjecture is that the minimalist design trend in Silicon Valley cuts against having many user-configurable options, which unfortunately affects accessibility. 1: https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/the-importance-of-text-accessibility-in-news-apps-45ac8cca2e9a https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/the-importance-of-text-acc...
stabbles 9y ago
I created a text only version https://noslite.nl https://noslite.nl for the public news service in The Netherlands. It's 1000x smaller in size and performs just 1 request per page.
pseingatl 9y ago
Meanwhile, AP has discontinued its text-only breaking news page.
feelin_googley 9y ago
The goal is to get the news with as little markup as possible. Then use UNIX filters to transform it into the format one prefers. For example, NYT has a jsonp feed I have posted before. # replace "world" with whatever NYT section you prefer curl -o 1.jsonp https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/world/index.jsonp exec sed '/\"guid\" :/!d;s/\",//;s/.*\"//' 1.jsonp Not every news site is the same of course. Using a list from journalism.org I took a small sampling of other news sites to see if they had, at a minimum, rss feeds. Most of them did but I stopped after about seven. As an experiment to enjoy text-only versions of popular news websites, convert the rss to html for a "text-only" version. The author of radare2 wrote a filter called "rss2html" some years ago and it works well enough for this experiment, so there is no work involved here.[1] rss2html will transform a page of rss xml to html, txt, etc. Build it with libcurl and it can fetch pages too. curl -o 1.xml http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/rss.xml rss2html 1.xml > 1.htm browser file://1.htm 1. http://web.archive.org/web/20140911194544/http://www.nopcode.org/blog/rss2html.html http://web.archive.org/web/20140911194544/http://www.nopcode... (use cvs.nopcode.org mirror) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/rss.xml http://feeds.reuters.com/Reuters/worldNews http://www.latimes.com/world/rss2.0.xml http://www.wsj.com/xml/rss/3_7085.xml http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/UsatodaycomWorld-TopStories http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/rss/world I routinely write custom filters. Even if a news site has no rss feed it is not difficult to produce csv or whatever format I need. However it is tedious. A one-time cost.
mankash666 9y ago
Just pitched a related idea to a friend, but since a "two sided marketplace" is advised against for bootstrapped startups, have put it on the back burner. Pitch: A "podcasts for textual content" optimized for low bandwidth. An podcast like app that lets you subscribe to (textual content) creators, auto downloads for offline reading, allows reviews on individual posts or entire series, presents content in an ebook like aesthetic manner, and has the lowest bandwidth for transmission and storage because: 1. Transmission and storage is in markdown (not HTML) 2. Pretrained language models shall result in higher compression ratios than regular gzip of HTML common in browsers. Feedback appreciated
- Un1corn 9y ago
  Sounds similar to RSS, maybe except the markdown but apps like pocket can already extract the content.
- fivre 9y ago
  Congratulations on inventing the newspaper.
  - mankash666 9y ago
    And which newspaper allows you to read your neighbor's blog, your favorite entrepreneurs deepest fears, and the news from South Africa, all preloaded per your subscription choices? (Assuming this platform actually gathers steam). It's not reinventing the newspaper, just like podcasts weren't like reinventing the radio
    - matt4077 9y ago
      The RSS Times
    - jstarfish 9y ago
      Honestly, what is the difference between this and RSS? Your pitch sounds like the feature list for gReader. I subscribe to the local paper, some financial blogs and some tech blogs. They are preloaded onto my device and presented to me in a common format every time I charge it.
jdowner 9y ago
I find it astonishing how much of my laptops resources are occupied by a web browser. But I came to believe that it was not necessarily a problem with the web browsers per se but that each website would have a variety of javascript constantly running, and most of that code is not providing any information that I want. So I have turned off javascript in the browser. It breaks many sites, but, especially for news sites, it makes for a quieter experience. I also like to archive many of the articles that I read, but I don't like keeping bookmarks. So I wrote a small utility to convert html to text by combining 'readability' (python) and lynx (text-base web browser), which does a nice job of formatting the content and storing the hyperlinks as footnotes. This archive is also nice and easy to index if you are so inclined.
- grx 9y ago
  Sounds good, would you share your source code?
  - jdowner 9y ago
    Sure. https://gist.github.com/25facbfd1aa3816457ba9c5d2040cd3c https://gist.github.com/25facbfd1aa3816457ba9c5d2040cd3c
- gkya 9y ago
  I have this project of moving most of my browsing to EWW (the native web browser in Emacs) and using a full-fledged web browser only when I need to use some web app. But many content-only websites are going with completely dynamically rendered pages with React or what not, so all you have is void at worst if you disable JS or view with a text-only browser, and garbled up unreadable stuff if you're lucky. Also e.g. the comment hierarchy of HN does not render nicely with text browsers.
  - jdowner 9y ago
    Agreed. I am using opera at the moment with javascript turned off by default. But there are some sites I want to use that are simply non-functional without javascript enabled. I add those sites to a list of exceptions. However, as a result of having javascript off by default, I will sometimes find a site that I cannot view and it makes me ask the question -- do I really want to see this content? is this a site that I want to add to my list of exceptions? I find it useful to ask those questions and step back from browsing to reflecting on whether that is the best use of my time right then. ymmv.
grx 9y ago
The rise of static site generators was a similar topic some months ago, I think those two play together very well. There seems to be a trend in disconnecting content and interactive input elements, sourcing out handling of comment systems to providers like Disqus. It allows a smaller publishing interface without the need to invest in big backends. As soon as there is no more input handling needed on my infrastructure, migrating to static content is a logical step. Secondly, I hold myself to the same standards I want to see from other website owners: no bloated adscripts, no tracking and no excessive execution of code inside my browser. Pages that do not display content with disabled Javascript should rethink their priorities - it not only excludes people with no JS, screen readers or text-browsers; it also fails to make me recommend the link on Twitter or Facebook.
- nickjj 9y ago
  They do. I use Jekyll to build my site, which is served up with nginx. 2+ years and 100+ articles later and I think it was a great move. You tend to strive to keep things fast and minimal, rather than bolt on a bunch of bloated plugins and other things that detract from the reading experience.
techaddict009 9y ago
Off beat tip: Also if you want to convert any existing website to light weight you can use https://googleweblight.com/?lite_url=<News https://googleweblight.com/?lite_url=<News Article URL>
ezequiel-garzon 9y ago
Great news! On a related front, I find it appalling that a $1000+ device that can map your face, tell you where you are and act as a real-time assistant renders unstyled HTML with absurdly tiny font size. (Things are still sane enough that the viewport tag will eventually become part of CSS, not HTML [1].) And pelase don't suggest Safari's Reader View as an alternative: it will happily skip tables and short paragraphs, without any warning. Moreover, if it didn't do these things, why not make that Reader View the Deafault View for CSS-less HTML documents? Arrrgh! [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/css-device-adapt-1/#viewport-meta https://www.w3.org/TR/css-device-adapt-1/#viewport-meta
rawfael 9y ago
Please, more websites like hacker news, wikipedia, techmeme, reddit, craiglist and drudge report
dredmorbius 9y ago
This is a case of what I'm coming to call a Gresham's Mechanism, after Gresham's Law. The phenomena we see as Gresham's Law, which does and always has exerted itself far beyond coinage -- the first use is found in Aristophanes' "The Frogs", in ancient Greece, referring to both coin and politicians, concerns a fitness or reward mechanism, within some environment, specifically to complexity or quality. This can express itself as both a non-reward of higher quality, and of a temporary seeking of greater complexity, depending on a number of factors (and I'm still trying to sort out a description of how these may manifest). In the instant case of Websites, chasing advertising dollars has rewarded more complex, and paradoxically, less informational sites, which are expensive in terms of the compute resources required to deliver them. There is a possible inflection point at which simpler, lighter-weight alternatives can present both more and better information, sufficient visual appeal (see my comments and links elsehere in this thread), and at far less complexity. This also shows up in various technologies and progressions, particularly as a novel "worse-is-better" option emerges and overturns an established method or product.
RandyRanderson 9y ago
If only there were some really simple standard for text and rich media syndication...

259 points by georgecmu 9y ago

TLDR: to prevent DoS in case of natural and man made disasters: hurricanes, terrorist attacks.

> Bowden: Text in HTML is the way to go here; you cover accessibility issues and SEO bots, while simultaneously also being usable on the maximum number of devices possible. HTML and CSS are forgiving in the sense that you can make mistakes in them, and something will still be rendered to the user. Browsers are built with backwards compatibility, so combining them all grants you the extended coverage. Meaning that basic sites will work on nearly any phone. Any computer. Any browser. So many modern javascript heavy websites that are pain to build, pain to index, pain to maintain, pain to download and consume, painful to support older devices. We got here because it was trendy...and now we've come to a full circle.

endemic 9y ago
From a pragmatic perspective: adding a level of interactivity via JavaScript requires a lot of work and/or $$$. Text content Just Works.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  And think of disabled people who use screen readers and similarly limited interfaces. A simple text-based website works so much better with these tools than a JS and AJAX abomination.

agumonkey 9y ago

These are fine technical reasons. I'll add some human ones: - vanilla html webpages had way more actual content [1] - they don't burden you with updates, social sharing [1] nowadays very often you run into a site with header, menu, flashing area, related articles, footer, cookie warning, etc etc. In the middle of all this you can barely see the first paragraph. And when you scroll down you realize there's only two of them. html5/css3 improved the wrong factors, or at least gave people the wrong idea about where to spend time

joe_the_user 9y ago
Also - text only automatically involves a standard that avoids bloat of all kinds. Once a graphic webpage has traffic but isn't a front-runner, there's a temptation to keep adding more little graphic pieces of crap that slowly the site becomes completely unusable - see slashdot and yahoo.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  you know it got to a point where, and I've read other people say it; whenever I run into an html4 days webpage, I feel all relaxed. I know there's gonna be zero shitty tricks to monetize anything. Even a crappy geocities page feels better.
borplk 9y ago
You scroll down a bit, an obnoxious overlay jumps out "GET THE BEST TIPS IN YOUR EMAIL" ... with an even more obnoxious cancel button "No I'm dumb and don't want the best tips in my email". Then as you attempt to exit the tab the "exit intent" crap kicks in "NOOOO don't go!". Sometimes I miss the days when no one cared about the internet.
- tannhaeuser 9y ago
  You forgot the "DOWNLOAD OUR APP FOR (whatever reason)" part, the app being a custom browser. Though, apart from Ajax, HTML5 lacks a simple way to compose markup at the browser side, thereby avoiding full page reloads, like SGML had over 30 years ago ([2]). HTML imports are basically dead, and weren't great or widely used to begin with ([1]). [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/HTML_Imports https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/... [2]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/templating.html http://sgmljs.net/docs/templating.html (my project to bring back markup technologies to the Web)
pwaai 9y ago
I miss the 90s web I used to browse with Netscape Navigator. I really liked static navigation menus where I didn't have to stop and infer the functionalities from an icon or hidden expendable/scrolling menus. I made my first website with it when I was 11 (still have it on a cd rom)...it was so simple to use. In fact, a lot of stuff in the late 90s to the early 2000s were very approachable as a curious noob. I started tinkering with QBASIC during 1997 on an old 286 with a monochrome monitor (still have it), and when I got a Windows computer and I tried to make a Warez site on Geocities lol....manually searching altavista for 50mb rar parts compressing Playstation ISO images on a 56k modem, hosted on myspace.com (when it used to be a file storage)...it took all summer to compile but again everything was easier because people didn't give a shit what the site looked like, they just cared about what they could get for free. Now it seems impossible to get away without some trendy UI framework or experts reminding us how we are doing it wrong...which ironically increased the webpage filesize to 196kbps mp3 files that works on modern devices.

gmu3 9y ago

Hate it or love it the drudge report remains one of the most powerful sites on the internet

wjdp 9y ago

Minorly ironic the rest of the article about accessible text only content is hidden behind a non-functional (for me, currently) 'Read More' button.

BenjiWiebe 9y ago
Non-functional for me as well. :(
- jwilk 9y ago
  Try the archived copy: https://archive.is/YtQ4b https://archive.is/YtQ4b

niftich 9y ago

"Lite" versions of news sites are a smart compromise between two competing forces: the desire to appeal to audiences that are put off by garish, heavyweight sites, and to do so in a way that doesn't endanger the revenue they get from all the trackers and advertising on their fat sites. By making the text-only version a separate destination, most of their traffic still flows to their multimedia site by default and by habit. The light version is always advertised by them for specific use-cases only: quick access in emergencies and for usage in "emerging markets" (inaccurate marketing-speak for low-bandwidth connections on low-power devices). The market forces behind text-only news sites are not unlike those behind AMP links, Facebook Instant Articles, and the Apple News app. News sites want their news to be read, but not at the cost of not getting paid. It's a difficult problem to solve, and these "secondary" text sites typically get the content in front of the most ad-averse eyeballs anyway, so they're not currently a threat.

wheresmyusern 9y ago

there is a huge problem with browsers right now -- they are very complicated and big and therefore their development is monopolized by three large organizations, leading to browsers that dont adhere to the best interests of the users. and yet, as this article demonstrates, much of the internet does not require any of the complicated machinery in modern browsers. we have seen our culture, the worlds culture, adopt computers and the internet. gaming, social media, all kinds of media distributed over the internet -- we have grown into the internet. and with this development, we are fast approaching a platou, a period of maturity where it is clear what exactly the internet is used for by most people in most cases, and also (critically) how those uses are implemented. when the internet was born, we made browsers with a turing complete language built in and we made all the tools very general, all because we didnt know what was going to happen. we had to be ready for anything. this is simply not true anymore. off the cuff, the internet is used for reading forums, reading news, watching video and listening to music. perhaps a new kind of browser can be adopted that has those things baked in and nothing else. this kind of browser would meet most of peoples needs while being simple enough to make competition possible, thus aligning these new browsers with the interests of users. these browsers would be much, much safer as well. for other kind of websites, sophisticated web apps that allow you to interface with a service, like email or time clocking or whatever, perhaps those things could be branched off into a new area where js, wasm and binary distribution live. perhaps a different class of browsers. with these kinds of browsers, there is more pressure to align with users interests because users can soft-boycott them because 90 percent of their needs are met by the simpler browsers mentioned earlier. and perhaps a new standard for interfacing with documents can be baked into these new simpler browsers to further take necessity and power away from js and wasm browsers. for things like emails, remote document manipulation, assignment submissions, etc, a lot of that could be fit into a standard that is baked into the browser instead of being re-implemented in js for every instance. a new class of simple browsers would create a new division of the internet that is clean, fast, simple and worry free much like these text only news sites. if one could bake payment into the browser as well, creating the most friction-less payment experience on the internet ever seen, we could see a re-vitalization like that seen with patreon all over again.

slig 9y ago

rayiner 9y ago

Click through some of the CNN or NPR links to an article. It’s a thing of beauty.

0x445442 9y ago
Yeah this is so timely. I've been lamenting lately about the UI train wreck that is the current status of the web and about how it's nothing but a massive direct marketing platform.
tuxracer 9y ago
For some reason they didn't link to the HTTPS versions: https://lite.cnn.io/en https://lite.cnn.io/en https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/

vinspee 9y ago

I’d also point out https://tiny.ted.com/ https://tiny.ted.com/ - a (mostly) text version of TED. It defaults to the full transcript of talks.

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago

NoScript+images off turns many sites into low bandwidth text.

taeric 9y ago

I want this to be true. But I highly doubt it will stay. :( Would be really neat to see numbers supporting that this is more than just a few fringe people being served. I've recently started using an RSS reader again and I'm finding that I can find some feeds, but what I don't know where to find is a good place to discuss the articles. More, it does feel like the feeds are a second class citizen, at best. Is amusing to see the page that lists some feeds, such as https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fear-not-readers-we-have-rss-feeds/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fear-not-readers-we-hav... still list the demise of google reader. Which, sadly, reminds me that I haven't checked google+ is about as long.

jswizzy 9y ago

Drudge is a pretty good case study in minimalistic design. By most metrics it's ugly and even baroque but it's brilliant because it is easy to parse and gets to the meat of the narrative that Matt is trying to sell to his audience.

kakarot 9y ago
I've always been extremely impressed with Drudge's design. It's quick, easy to maintain, and has been completely mobile optimized since the flip-phone days. It is built around showing you information, instead of information being an excuse to show you ads. Matt understands what he is providing and that insemination of information is more valuable than any extreme monetization strategies. It doesn't have a confusing landscape of sections, icon fonts, ad videos and promotional content that prevent newcomers from understanding the flow. It takes but a few clicks before you are intimate with the interface. It is the quintessential "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" I just wish there were more publications of this style that weren't hyper-conservative and biased. For another example of a beautifully designed site that puts information first, look at Cryptome. https://cryptome.org/ https://cryptome.org/

akras14 9y ago

I wrote a simple RSS feed viewer for myself for the same reason. A lot of times I just want to read the headlines from top news sites. https://www.alexkras.com/eznews/ https://www.alexkras.com/eznews/ If I am actually interested in the story I don’t mind waiting a bit for it to load.

nooyurrsdey 9y ago
This is great! Any chance you have the source code for this handy somewhere? Edit: Never mind, found it linked from your blog! For anyone else looking: https://github.com/akras14/eznews/blob/master/index.php https://github.com/akras14/eznews/blob/master/index.php Nice work!
- akras14 9y ago
  Thanks, Here is the blog post to go with it: Simple RSS Reader in 85 Lines of PHP - https://www.alexkras.com/simple-rss-reader-in-85-lines-of-php/ https://www.alexkras.com/simple-rss-reader-in-85-lines-of-ph...
gunnihinn 9y ago
Nice. I did the same a couple of months ago: http://www.magnusson.io/evil-feed-reader http://www.magnusson.io/evil-feed-reader It does very little, but exactly what I want.
unicornporn 9y ago
There's also http://simplepie.org/ http://simplepie.org/ for those who don't wish to roll their own.

kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago

By all means today's content websites are an abomination, but I don't see why we need to throw the baby out with the bath water by completely rejecting any attempt at styling websites and going back on all readability best practices. I see a lot of websites now which, in an attempt to reject all the nonsense, end up rejecting even basic CSS, and you are subjected to browser width text in Times New Roman with ugly blue underlined links (danluu.com is a good example. Such great content that I love to read but, to be honest, ugly). Surely there is a middle ground? Something as simple as the following can make your website look neat and readable: body { font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; max-width: 800px; margin: 0 auto; } a { text-decoration: none; } Some very very minimal frameworks like Sakura attempt to do just that (https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura)

feelin_googley 9y ago
danluu.com looks great in my text-only browser. No Times New Roman, no blue underlined links. Maybe the problem is with your browser?
nerflad 9y ago
I read Dan's website in Firefox Reader View. It's great. I love the plaintext web but I agree some better default styling wouldn't hurt.
CaptSpify 9y ago
I personally think a better approach is to hand out fully un-stylized sites, and provide a recommended CSS for people to apply client-side. That way the client can adjust things more consistently to how they find it easier to read.
- bartread 9y ago
  The problem with that approach is it will only appeal to power-users. "Normal" people just don't care. My mum, my step-dad, my brother and his fiancee, my next door neighbours, my best friend and my worst enemy all have this in common: they go to a website and they want to see the content on the page. They don't care why or how, so they're never going to apply an optional CSS file, even in the unlikely event they understand what it is. Sorry, that's not meant to come off as a brutal put-down: it's just the way most people are about the web.

kibrad 9y ago

one of the main reasons is that people feel more comfortable accessing text only sites at work

gnicholas 9y ago

For those interested in the accessibility side of news apps, I did a survey [1] of many popular news apps and their text accessibility features. The general trend was that news outlets generally offer some text accessibility settings, and big tech company apps did not offer any text settings at all. My conjecture is that the minimalist design trend in Silicon Valley cuts against having many user-configurable options, which unfortunately affects accessibility. 1: https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/the-importance-of-text-accessibility-in-news-apps-45ac8cca2e9a https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/the-importance-of-text-acc...

stabbles 9y ago

I created a text only version https://noslite.nl https://noslite.nl for the public news service in The Netherlands. It's 1000x smaller in size and performs just 1 request per page.

pseingatl 9y ago

Meanwhile, AP has discontinued its text-only breaking news page.

feelin_googley 9y ago

The goal is to get the news with as little markup as possible. Then use UNIX filters to transform it into the format one prefers. For example, NYT has a jsonp feed I have posted before. # replace "world" with whatever NYT section you prefer curl -o 1.jsonp https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/world/index.jsonp exec sed '/\"guid\" :/!d;s/\",//;s/.*\"//' 1.jsonp Not every news site is the same of course. Using a list from journalism.org I took a small sampling of other news sites to see if they had, at a minimum, rss feeds. Most of them did but I stopped after about seven. As an experiment to enjoy text-only versions of popular news websites, convert the rss to html for a "text-only" version. The author of radare2 wrote a filter called "rss2html" some years ago and it works well enough for this experiment, so there is no work involved here.[1] rss2html will transform a page of rss xml to html, txt, etc. Build it with libcurl and it can fetch pages too. curl -o 1.xml http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/rss.xml rss2html 1.xml > 1.htm browser file://1.htm 1. http://web.archive.org/web/20140911194544/http://www.nopcode.org/blog/rss2html.html http://web.archive.org/web/20140911194544/http://www.nopcode... (use cvs.nopcode.org mirror) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/rss.xml http://feeds.reuters.com/Reuters/worldNews http://www.latimes.com/world/rss2.0.xml http://www.wsj.com/xml/rss/3_7085.xml http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/UsatodaycomWorld-TopStories http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/rss/world I routinely write custom filters. Even if a news site has no rss feed it is not difficult to produce csv or whatever format I need. However it is tedious. A one-time cost.

mankash666 9y ago

Just pitched a related idea to a friend, but since a "two sided marketplace" is advised against for bootstrapped startups, have put it on the back burner. Pitch: A "podcasts for textual content" optimized for low bandwidth. An podcast like app that lets you subscribe to (textual content) creators, auto downloads for offline reading, allows reviews on individual posts or entire series, presents content in an ebook like aesthetic manner, and has the lowest bandwidth for transmission and storage because: 1. Transmission and storage is in markdown (not HTML) 2. Pretrained language models shall result in higher compression ratios than regular gzip of HTML common in browsers. Feedback appreciated

Un1corn 9y ago
Sounds similar to RSS, maybe except the markdown but apps like pocket can already extract the content.
fivre 9y ago
Congratulations on inventing the newspaper.
- mankash666 9y ago
  And which newspaper allows you to read your neighbor's blog, your favorite entrepreneurs deepest fears, and the news from South Africa, all preloaded per your subscription choices? (Assuming this platform actually gathers steam). It's not reinventing the newspaper, just like podcasts weren't like reinventing the radio
  - matt4077 9y ago
    The RSS Times
  - jstarfish 9y ago
    Honestly, what is the difference between this and RSS? Your pitch sounds like the feature list for gReader. I subscribe to the local paper, some financial blogs and some tech blogs. They are preloaded onto my device and presented to me in a common format every time I charge it.

jdowner 9y ago

I find it astonishing how much of my laptops resources are occupied by a web browser. But I came to believe that it was not necessarily a problem with the web browsers per se but that each website would have a variety of javascript constantly running, and most of that code is not providing any information that I want. So I have turned off javascript in the browser. It breaks many sites, but, especially for news sites, it makes for a quieter experience. I also like to archive many of the articles that I read, but I don't like keeping bookmarks. So I wrote a small utility to convert html to text by combining 'readability' (python) and lynx (text-base web browser), which does a nice job of formatting the content and storing the hyperlinks as footnotes. This archive is also nice and easy to index if you are so inclined.

grx 9y ago
Sounds good, would you share your source code?
- jdowner 9y ago
  Sure. https://gist.github.com/25facbfd1aa3816457ba9c5d2040cd3c https://gist.github.com/25facbfd1aa3816457ba9c5d2040cd3c
gkya 9y ago
I have this project of moving most of my browsing to EWW (the native web browser in Emacs) and using a full-fledged web browser only when I need to use some web app. But many content-only websites are going with completely dynamically rendered pages with React or what not, so all you have is void at worst if you disable JS or view with a text-only browser, and garbled up unreadable stuff if you're lucky. Also e.g. the comment hierarchy of HN does not render nicely with text browsers.
- jdowner 9y ago
  Agreed. I am using opera at the moment with javascript turned off by default. But there are some sites I want to use that are simply non-functional without javascript enabled. I add those sites to a list of exceptions. However, as a result of having javascript off by default, I will sometimes find a site that I cannot view and it makes me ask the question -- do I really want to see this content? is this a site that I want to add to my list of exceptions? I find it useful to ask those questions and step back from browsing to reflecting on whether that is the best use of my time right then. ymmv.

grx 9y ago

The rise of static site generators was a similar topic some months ago, I think those two play together very well. There seems to be a trend in disconnecting content and interactive input elements, sourcing out handling of comment systems to providers like Disqus. It allows a smaller publishing interface without the need to invest in big backends. As soon as there is no more input handling needed on my infrastructure, migrating to static content is a logical step. Secondly, I hold myself to the same standards I want to see from other website owners: no bloated adscripts, no tracking and no excessive execution of code inside my browser. Pages that do not display content with disabled Javascript should rethink their priorities - it not only excludes people with no JS, screen readers or text-browsers; it also fails to make me recommend the link on Twitter or Facebook.

nickjj 9y ago
They do. I use Jekyll to build my site, which is served up with nginx. 2+ years and 100+ articles later and I think it was a great move. You tend to strive to keep things fast and minimal, rather than bolt on a bunch of bloated plugins and other things that detract from the reading experience.

techaddict009 9y ago

Off beat tip: Also if you want to convert any existing website to light weight you can use https://googleweblight.com/?lite_url=<News https://googleweblight.com/?lite_url=<News Article URL>

ezequiel-garzon 9y ago

Great news! On a related front, I find it appalling that a $1000+ device that can map your face, tell you where you are and act as a real-time assistant renders unstyled HTML with absurdly tiny font size. (Things are still sane enough that the viewport tag will eventually become part of CSS, not HTML [1].) And pelase don't suggest Safari's Reader View as an alternative: it will happily skip tables and short paragraphs, without any warning. Moreover, if it didn't do these things, why not make that Reader View the Deafault View for CSS-less HTML documents? Arrrgh! [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/css-device-adapt-1/#viewport-meta https://www.w3.org/TR/css-device-adapt-1/#viewport-meta

rawfael 9y ago

Please, more websites like hacker news, wikipedia, techmeme, reddit, craiglist and drudge report

dredmorbius 9y ago

This is a case of what I'm coming to call a Gresham's Mechanism, after Gresham's Law. The phenomena we see as Gresham's Law, which does and always has exerted itself far beyond coinage -- the first use is found in Aristophanes' "The Frogs", in ancient Greece, referring to both coin and politicians, concerns a fitness or reward mechanism, within some environment, specifically to complexity or quality. This can express itself as both a non-reward of higher quality, and of a temporary seeking of greater complexity, depending on a number of factors (and I'm still trying to sort out a description of how these may manifest). In the instant case of Websites, chasing advertising dollars has rewarded more complex, and paradoxically, less informational sites, which are expensive in terms of the compute resources required to deliver them. There is a possible inflection point at which simpler, lighter-weight alternatives can present both more and better information, sufficient visual appeal (see my comments and links elsehere in this thread), and at far less complexity. This also shows up in various technologies and progressions, particularly as a novel "worse-is-better" option emerges and overturns an established method or product.

RandyRanderson 9y ago

If only there were some really simple standard for text and rich media syndication...