4 ms·
│ Today I turned off my ad blocker, enabled JavaScript, opened my network monitor, and │ clicked the first link on Hacker News - a New York Times article. It s
by danmg 8y ago
│ Today I turned off my ad blocker, enabled JavaScript, opened my network monitor, and
│ clicked the first link on Hacker News - a New York Times article. It started by
│ downloading a megabyte of data as it rendered the page over the course of eight full
│ seconds. The page opens with an advertisement 281 pixels tall, placed before even the
│ title of the article. As I scrolled down, more and more requests were made,
| downloading a total of 2.8 MB of data with 748 HTTP
| requests.
That's why I do that in the background with a python script and inline the contents of the hn articles into an RSS feed [1] that I read on a terminal based client [2]. Source [3].
[1] https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/output.rss https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/...
[2] https://codezen.org/canto-ng/ https://codezen.org/canto-ng/
[3] https://github.com/damng/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content https://github.com/damng/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content
- specialist 8y agoI just tried http://nytimes.com http://nytimes.com with both Lynx and Safari "in Lynx mode" (disabled JS, CSS, Images). Reminded me how much I miss gopher. Lynx's rendering was unusable, because their front page has all the nav, colophon, etc. cruft ahead of the content (in the DOM). Safari's rendering was almost usable. It still shows fancy typeface for the headmast, etc. Huh. Then I tried to disable custom fonts. I was amused to learn they're rendered with SVG, with no alt-text.
- danmg 8y agoyeah lynx needs a fork that uses dom-distiller to render things off screen, and then just uses its own renderer to show the final content.