16 ms·

Rediscovering the beauty of text on the internet

130 points by ColinWright 6y ago

pickdenis 6y ago
Posting this comment because I didn't see it mentioned in the article. This is a wonderful collection of old text files: http://textfiles.com/ http://textfiles.com/
- pgnas 6y ago
  Thanks for this! I completely forgotten about the site.i remember those CDs with all the text files such as this, excellent.
weinzierl 6y ago
This article makes some good points but it fails in one respect to follow it's own premises. It starts with a nice and funny but completely useless image. This might be a pet peeve of mine but I really prefer articles that get straight to the point and start with their main argument. For good examples see the blogs of Drew DeVault, Dan Luu or Gwern. EDIT: Ha, I should not comment without having read the article thoroughly to the end. It indeed addresses this very point: "You are no doubt aware that this article begins with a picture. The reason I include pictures in most of my articles is in the unlikely event that an average Internet user stumbles upon one, he will be less likely to leave immediately." Is there any hard data that the bounce rate increases if there is no image at the beginning? Are there good examples of pages where this image really ties in with and adds to the content that follows?
- type0 6y ago
  > Is there any hard data that the bounce rate increases if there is no image at the beginning? Are there good examples of pages where this image really ties in with and adds to the content that follows? I don't think picture itself is the thing, human seek novelty and visual impressions come naturally. If you can afford to design each page to be slightly different and memorable you should achieve the same effect, if there is one.
ebg13 6y ago
Text can be beautiful, but only if you don't go out of your way to make it less so. This is a view of my entire screen when this page loads. https://imgur.com/Lh3Ibo3 https://imgur.com/Lh3Ibo3 That's decidedly not beautiful. And while WCAG checkers all swear that both this site and the linked tilde.town pass text contrast guidelines with flying (* ahem *) colors, my eyes just cannot cope with trying to read the text on those backgrounds.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  same, uMatrix > disable CSS
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sT370ma2 6y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. In trying to make the text look good in medium to small screens, I hadn't considered what the page could look like for people reading on a screen that is more than 1440 pixels across. I've modified the css file. Clear your browsing history and try looking at the article again.
  - amazing_stories 6y ago
    Are you the author? Thanks for nice article, I always love to confirm my own opinions! I agree with ebg13, the presentation of your article could be a little more attractive. On a web made for reading there are few simple style rules I use for all text. 1st, I use a line-height of at least 1.5 because every browser's default line spacing is too narrow. (Quanta Magazine gets posted here a lot and I think their average line height is 1.875.) 2nd, keep column width to 100 characters or below (the article already meets this). And 3rd, keep background colors desaturated as to not distract from the most important part of the website: the text!
    - sT370ma2 6y ago
      Yes, I'm the author. I try hard to accommodate as many browsers/apps/screen sizes/devices/reader preferences as possible. But given the large number of them, it is not possible to make every reader 100% happy. I've found that keeping things simple generally works well for most people. For those who want to leave comments about the problems associated with their particular approach to reading my website, I have given them a place to do so: https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/cheapskatesguide-and-browsers.html https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/cheapskatesguide-and-b....
pastrami_panda 6y ago
Something about the contrast between the pink and black makes this site unreadable for me. The text is also cramped inside a small container that doesn't utilize my screen real-estate.
- Finnucane 6y ago
  You’d think a website that was devoted to being mainly plain text would at least put a little effort into making the text more readable.
  - arexxbifs 6y ago
    The beauty of "plain text" web sites is that with any decent web browser you can either turn CSS off, load your own CSS or switch to reader mode.
    - Finnucane 6y ago
      So, just make it the users’ problem?
      - arexxbifs 6y ago
        You honestly think it's a problem to tap a single button on your phone or pressing Ctrl-Alt-R? Of all the problems created by web and UI design, this isn't one of them.
        kovac 6y ago
        You honestly think the users should load their own css?
        userbinator 6y ago
        I'm not the one you're asking, but... yes. User stylesheets are even part of the standard. The fact that the most common (and maybe "oppressive") browser doesn't support them is itself a problem.
feiss 6y ago
While there are some truths in the article, many that I share, I think the author usually reaches to wrong conclusions from some true premises. Text only websites, while revolutionary and nerdy, are not the solution. We need well designed websites, optimized and lightweight. Images and videos are incredibly powerful, attractive, and can give an incredible amount of information (the cat example is ridiculous), removing them makes no sense. If you think too many people read gossip magazines and tabloids, don't blame the pictures and go asking for text only magazines and books. Blame the publishers chasing easy money, blame the education system, blame the amygdala... But not images.
- visarga 6y ago
  Yeah, I think the author overgeneralises that videos are a bad medium for technical information. I watch a few channels with ML paper discussions and they are incredibly well made, maybe better than reading the paper itself for grasping the core message. Yannic Kilcher - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZHmQk67mSJgfCCTn7xBfew https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZHmQk67mSJgfCCTn7xBfew Henry AI Labs - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHB9VepY6kYvZjj0Bgxnpbw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHB9VepY6kYvZjj0Bgxnpbw
pgnas 6y ago
I love this idea. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing better than a well executed modern site with all the bells and whistles, but there is still the adage , just because you can, doesn't mean you should. People reading news, want just that, nothing more, well, I guess that is what I prefer.
jart 6y ago
Many of us have been pursuing personal projects to breathe new life into old technologies: Nick Black has been doing great work creating a successor to ncurses. He took the latest and greatest modern C++ / UNICODE development practices, and made it work really well for the old school terminal stuff from decades ago, which was easier said that done. https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses See also Cosmopolitan, which is more focused on the use case: "All I want is stdio and math; how can I do that without all the breaking builds and broken hearts?" https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan Please consider supporting us. These old technologies are widely supported and have stood the test of time. Any positive developments towards making them fresh again, is going to benefit both you and the technology community as a whole.
- arexxbifs 6y ago
  Can't say anything about Cosmopolitan, but I'm a huge fan of TUI:s, so notcurses is a great initiative. However, a text-centric web doesn't have to be "old technology". With HTML5 and CSS3, pages can look and feel very modern indeed and still not use tons of JavaScript frameworks. And with just a bit of added care, things can work swell in TUI browsers, phones and "modern" browsers alike.
  - jart 6y ago
    I agree that the web is an outstanding platform. Many things exist that command line programs are much better at doing, e.g. web serving, text editing, matrix multiplication, and relu. We need to know that PCs will continue to be an open affordable alternative, which continues to maintain backward compatibility as designed. Technologies such as WebAssembly and GPU interfaces are still too new and experimental for many of us to feel comfortable opening it up to every news website we visit. We need to know that operating system vendors will continue to feel comfortable allowing us to easily share simple open source programs that have access to things like Intel's new instructions.
    - arexxbifs 6y ago
      Oh, I just meant that text-centric doesn’t necessarily mean it should be considered ”old”: plenty of nifty features of semantic markup and CSS can be utilized to make a ”plaintext” web page look and feel very contemporary. That excludes things like JS, WebAssembly, WebGL etc.
jacquesm 6y ago
A good stand-in for page quality to me is size of bodytext:total payload. I should analyze my own blog to see what that ratio comes down to, I'd hope it would be quite good.
shuntress 6y ago
"to wish that the average engineer would suddenly begin to care about using his work day productively." I know no one likes to hear this but if you must pick a pronoun for a hypothetical "average" engineer you should use "they" or "she" to help readers be more mindful of the unconscious bias in our field.
- _6qu6 6y ago
  Policing the language, unfortunately, does not bring change to the situation. Everyone who has lived in a totalitarian state knows this. “Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.” Oswald Spengler
  - wldlyinaccurate 6y ago
    Chill out, friend. Parent comment kindly suggested the use of a gender neutral noun to make the passage more inclusive. No one is forcing you to use nonexclusionary language. If you want to exclude over half of the world's population over fears of an invented oppressive regime then you are most welcome to.
    - _6qu6 6y ago
      This is a somewhat aggressive distortion of my words. I was merely referring to the fact that forcing the use of incorrect English will not help in the current situation of gender imbalance. And a reference to the "unconscious bias in our field" in the parent comment needs concrete citations and evidence to be of value to the discussion. How I truly wish there were more women in the field! But very few choose that profession, unfortunately. That is sad... I am not ready, however, to speculate about the reasons, since I don't have enough information. That is the reason for the reference to oppressive regimes - only there do people cripple the language to keep everything neutral and soulless, and only there do people make unverified assertions about non-existent enemies and conspirators.
      - 6y ago
chadlavi 6y ago
I was with the author until he started ranting about why he doesn't vote in political elections anymore
hliyan 6y ago
I was recently wishing more articles on the internet were written like unix man pages: purely textual and structured.
- zzo38computer 6y ago
  Yes, I should think so, too. Use a subset of HTML, with no CSS, and using commands such as <H1> and so on to specify headings and so on. Will any browser have a "table of contents" menu that uses these headings to automatically generate a table of contents?
codazoda 6y ago
I recently made https://neat.joeldare.com https://neat.joeldare.com based on a few of my favorite "text only" examples from the web, although I wouldn't call them that.
627467 6y ago
I've been thinking: what prevents a lynx-like desktop browser that effectively defaults to a Reader-Mode-only on all pages?
wsc981 6y ago
I haven't read the whole article, but I'd like to add that I really love to see more simpler webpages. For many sites (e.g. news), text only would be fine. In Thailand (where I live) I recently found a super-cheap internet subscription, paying about 1,00 USD (30 THB) per month [0]. Of course, this internet is really slow, not usable for modern sites / web apps like YouTube or Google Maps. But could be very decent if more sites would be trimmed in content to the bare essentials. --- [0]: https://oilinki.com/blog/worlds-cheapest-mobile-connection-go-plearn https://oilinki.com/blog/worlds-cheapest-mobile-connection-g...

130 points by ColinWright 6y ago

Posting this comment because I didn't see it mentioned in the article. This is a wonderful collection of old text files: http://textfiles.com/ http://textfiles.com/

pgnas 6y ago
Thanks for this! I completely forgotten about the site.i remember those CDs with all the text files such as this, excellent.

weinzierl 6y ago

This article makes some good points but it fails in one respect to follow it's own premises. It starts with a nice and funny but completely useless image. This might be a pet peeve of mine but I really prefer articles that get straight to the point and start with their main argument. For good examples see the blogs of Drew DeVault, Dan Luu or Gwern. EDIT: Ha, I should not comment without having read the article thoroughly to the end. It indeed addresses this very point: "You are no doubt aware that this article begins with a picture. The reason I include pictures in most of my articles is in the unlikely event that an average Internet user stumbles upon one, he will be less likely to leave immediately." Is there any hard data that the bounce rate increases if there is no image at the beginning? Are there good examples of pages where this image really ties in with and adds to the content that follows?

type0 6y ago
> Is there any hard data that the bounce rate increases if there is no image at the beginning? Are there good examples of pages where this image really ties in with and adds to the content that follows? I don't think picture itself is the thing, human seek novelty and visual impressions come naturally. If you can afford to design each page to be slightly different and memorable you should achieve the same effect, if there is one.

ebg13 6y ago

Text can be beautiful, but only if you don't go out of your way to make it less so. This is a view of my entire screen when this page loads. https://imgur.com/Lh3Ibo3 https://imgur.com/Lh3Ibo3 That's decidedly not beautiful. And while WCAG checkers all swear that both this site and the linked tilde.town pass text contrast guidelines with flying (* ahem *) colors, my eyes just cannot cope with trying to read the text on those backgrounds.

sergeykish 6y ago
same, uMatrix > disable CSS
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sT370ma2 6y ago
Thanks for the feedback. In trying to make the text look good in medium to small screens, I hadn't considered what the page could look like for people reading on a screen that is more than 1440 pixels across. I've modified the css file. Clear your browsing history and try looking at the article again.
- amazing_stories 6y ago
  Are you the author? Thanks for nice article, I always love to confirm my own opinions! I agree with ebg13, the presentation of your article could be a little more attractive. On a web made for reading there are few simple style rules I use for all text. 1st, I use a line-height of at least 1.5 because every browser's default line spacing is too narrow. (Quanta Magazine gets posted here a lot and I think their average line height is 1.875.) 2nd, keep column width to 100 characters or below (the article already meets this). And 3rd, keep background colors desaturated as to not distract from the most important part of the website: the text!
  - sT370ma2 6y ago
    Yes, I'm the author. I try hard to accommodate as many browsers/apps/screen sizes/devices/reader preferences as possible. But given the large number of them, it is not possible to make every reader 100% happy. I've found that keeping things simple generally works well for most people. For those who want to leave comments about the problems associated with their particular approach to reading my website, I have given them a place to do so: https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/cheapskatesguide-and-browsers.html https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/cheapskatesguide-and-b....

pastrami_panda 6y ago

Something about the contrast between the pink and black makes this site unreadable for me. The text is also cramped inside a small container that doesn't utilize my screen real-estate.

Finnucane 6y ago
You’d think a website that was devoted to being mainly plain text would at least put a little effort into making the text more readable.
- arexxbifs 6y ago
  The beauty of "plain text" web sites is that with any decent web browser you can either turn CSS off, load your own CSS or switch to reader mode.
  - Finnucane 6y ago
    So, just make it the users’ problem?
    - arexxbifs 6y ago
      You honestly think it's a problem to tap a single button on your phone or pressing Ctrl-Alt-R? Of all the problems created by web and UI design, this isn't one of them.
      - kovac 6y ago
        You honestly think the users should load their own css?
        userbinator 6y ago
        I'm not the one you're asking, but... yes. User stylesheets are even part of the standard. The fact that the most common (and maybe "oppressive") browser doesn't support them is itself a problem.

feiss 6y ago

While there are some truths in the article, many that I share, I think the author usually reaches to wrong conclusions from some true premises. Text only websites, while revolutionary and nerdy, are not the solution. We need well designed websites, optimized and lightweight. Images and videos are incredibly powerful, attractive, and can give an incredible amount of information (the cat example is ridiculous), removing them makes no sense. If you think too many people read gossip magazines and tabloids, don't blame the pictures and go asking for text only magazines and books. Blame the publishers chasing easy money, blame the education system, blame the amygdala... But not images.

visarga 6y ago
Yeah, I think the author overgeneralises that videos are a bad medium for technical information. I watch a few channels with ML paper discussions and they are incredibly well made, maybe better than reading the paper itself for grasping the core message. Yannic Kilcher - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZHmQk67mSJgfCCTn7xBfew https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZHmQk67mSJgfCCTn7xBfew Henry AI Labs - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHB9VepY6kYvZjj0Bgxnpbw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHB9VepY6kYvZjj0Bgxnpbw

pgnas 6y ago

I love this idea. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing better than a well executed modern site with all the bells and whistles, but there is still the adage , just because you can, doesn't mean you should. People reading news, want just that, nothing more, well, I guess that is what I prefer.

jart 6y ago

Many of us have been pursuing personal projects to breathe new life into old technologies: Nick Black has been doing great work creating a successor to ncurses. He took the latest and greatest modern C++ / UNICODE development practices, and made it work really well for the old school terminal stuff from decades ago, which was easier said that done. https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses See also Cosmopolitan, which is more focused on the use case: "All I want is stdio and math; how can I do that without all the breaking builds and broken hearts?" https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan Please consider supporting us. These old technologies are widely supported and have stood the test of time. Any positive developments towards making them fresh again, is going to benefit both you and the technology community as a whole.

arexxbifs 6y ago
Can't say anything about Cosmopolitan, but I'm a huge fan of TUI:s, so notcurses is a great initiative. However, a text-centric web doesn't have to be "old technology". With HTML5 and CSS3, pages can look and feel very modern indeed and still not use tons of JavaScript frameworks. And with just a bit of added care, things can work swell in TUI browsers, phones and "modern" browsers alike.
- jart 6y ago
  I agree that the web is an outstanding platform. Many things exist that command line programs are much better at doing, e.g. web serving, text editing, matrix multiplication, and relu. We need to know that PCs will continue to be an open affordable alternative, which continues to maintain backward compatibility as designed. Technologies such as WebAssembly and GPU interfaces are still too new and experimental for many of us to feel comfortable opening it up to every news website we visit. We need to know that operating system vendors will continue to feel comfortable allowing us to easily share simple open source programs that have access to things like Intel's new instructions.
  - arexxbifs 6y ago
    Oh, I just meant that text-centric doesn’t necessarily mean it should be considered ”old”: plenty of nifty features of semantic markup and CSS can be utilized to make a ”plaintext” web page look and feel very contemporary. That excludes things like JS, WebAssembly, WebGL etc.

jacquesm 6y ago

A good stand-in for page quality to me is size of bodytext:total payload. I should analyze my own blog to see what that ratio comes down to, I'd hope it would be quite good.

shuntress 6y ago

"to wish that the average engineer would suddenly begin to care about using his work day productively." I know no one likes to hear this but if you must pick a pronoun for a hypothetical "average" engineer you should use "they" or "she" to help readers be more mindful of the unconscious bias in our field.

_6qu6 6y ago
Policing the language, unfortunately, does not bring change to the situation. Everyone who has lived in a totalitarian state knows this. “Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.” Oswald Spengler
- wldlyinaccurate 6y ago
  Chill out, friend. Parent comment kindly suggested the use of a gender neutral noun to make the passage more inclusive. No one is forcing you to use nonexclusionary language. If you want to exclude over half of the world's population over fears of an invented oppressive regime then you are most welcome to.
  - _6qu6 6y ago
    This is a somewhat aggressive distortion of my words. I was merely referring to the fact that forcing the use of incorrect English will not help in the current situation of gender imbalance. And a reference to the "unconscious bias in our field" in the parent comment needs concrete citations and evidence to be of value to the discussion. How I truly wish there were more women in the field! But very few choose that profession, unfortunately. That is sad... I am not ready, however, to speculate about the reasons, since I don't have enough information. That is the reason for the reference to oppressive regimes - only there do people cripple the language to keep everything neutral and soulless, and only there do people make unverified assertions about non-existent enemies and conspirators.
    - 6y ago

chadlavi 6y ago

I was with the author until he started ranting about why he doesn't vote in political elections anymore

hliyan 6y ago

I was recently wishing more articles on the internet were written like unix man pages: purely textual and structured.

zzo38computer 6y ago
Yes, I should think so, too. Use a subset of HTML, with no CSS, and using commands such as <H1> and so on to specify headings and so on. Will any browser have a "table of contents" menu that uses these headings to automatically generate a table of contents?

codazoda 6y ago

I recently made https://neat.joeldare.com https://neat.joeldare.com based on a few of my favorite "text only" examples from the web, although I wouldn't call them that.

627467 6y ago

I've been thinking: what prevents a lynx-like desktop browser that effectively defaults to a Reader-Mode-only on all pages?

wsc981 6y ago

I haven't read the whole article, but I'd like to add that I really love to see more simpler webpages. For many sites (e.g. news), text only would be fine. In Thailand (where I live) I recently found a super-cheap internet subscription, paying about 1,00 USD (30 THB) per month [0]. Of course, this internet is really slow, not usable for modern sites / web apps like YouTube or Google Maps. But could be very decent if more sites would be trimmed in content to the bare essentials. --- [0]: https://oilinki.com/blog/worlds-cheapest-mobile-connection-go-plearn https://oilinki.com/blog/worlds-cheapest-mobile-connection-g...