16 ms·

68k.news: A Netscape 1.1 makeover of Google News

404 points by gripfx 6y ago

gripfx 6y ago
Interview with the founder on the Register[0] [0] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/29/google_news_netscape_port/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/29/google_news_netscape_...
- k1m 6y ago
  Thanks for the link. Technical part from that interview: > On a technical level, the site obtains stories through the existing Google News RSS feed, which are then processed with some PHP trickery. "Google News has a very nice RSS feed, for each topic, language and country. So I thought I could connect to that feed, and write some code to simplify the result way down to extremely basic HTML, targeting only tags available in the HTML 2.0 specification from 1995," said Malseed. > "So I used a PHP library called SimplePie to import the feed, and wrote some PHP code to simplify the results into a nice front page, using Netscape 2.0.2 on my 1989 Mac SE/30 to make sure it loaded fast and looked nice. The articles were a little more difficult, because they are on all sorts of different news sites with different formatting. > "So I found that Mozilla has an open-source library called Readability, which is what powers Firefox's reader mode. I used the PHP port of this, and then wrote a proxy that renders articles through Readability, and then I added some code to strip the results down even further to extremely basic HTML."
whalesalad 6y ago
This is great. I have been looking for a "world news in the style of techmeme" that isn't the drudge report.
tiborsaas 6y ago
Very retro with all those tags, but that's the job of CSS :) Edit: there was no CSS support in 1.1 :)
- icedchai 6y ago
 Yep, CSS wasn't really supported anywhere until 1997. Most places were still using font tags and table-based layouts for quite a while after.
 - jandrese 6y ago
 And in the 90s CSS was unreliable and often difficult to use. Internet Explorer made it difficult to go full CSS for a long time.
 - icedchai 6y ago
 I still think CSS is difficult to use. Out of HTML/CSS/JS, I despise CSS the most.
 - drummojg 6y ago
 It's what drove me out of wanting to work in Web authoring. I looked at CSS and literally decided "I am not going to learn this."
 icedchai 6y ago
 It has gotten a bit better. The early CSS era (floats, etc) was worse than tables, I thought.
 jandrese 6y ago
 Early CSS had a huge problem with this. "Don't use tables, use CSS!" was a big message. But CSS's tools for tabular layout were extremely poor and difficult to use, leading to much frustration. It was a joke how hard it was to create a simple responsive three column layout in CSS, a thing easily accomplished with tables and very common on the web. Getting that three column layout right seemed like black magic in CSS1.
tyingq 6y ago
Looks/works nice in lynx (text browser) as well, where google news itself does not. Bookmarked.
- every 6y ago
  Works nicely in links2 as well... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)
alpb 6y ago
It would be great to get this working on each of our personalized Google News feed. But I suspect it would require either a userscript stylesheet or Google sign-in (if that even gives you a personalized feed).
throwaway823882 6y ago
Considering the content, maybe it should be renamed "Google Trivia". It's like a bad version of Reddit with no comments for context/addl information.
pcdoodle 6y ago
Super cool. SE/30's are amazing machines. Does HN render on netscape <= V4?
- helfire 6y ago
 Pretty ok - https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#https://news.ycombinator.com https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#https://news.ycombinat...
eljimmy 6y ago
Viewing the source of that webpage really takes you back. Plain old HTML. It's nostalgic beauty. I recently fixed up an old 486 I purchased off eBay but it was bittersweet when I managed to get it connected to the 'net. Most websites were inaccessible due to the lack of support for today's encryption protocols, those that were had numerous JavaScript issues.
- dheera 6y ago
 Except this bullshit: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <html> Back in the day, you only needed: <html>
 - jhgb 6y ago
 Don't you only need <!DOCTYPE html> <html> these days? That's slightly worse but not terribly so IMO.
 - dheera 6y ago
 Oh I actually quoted the website's source. They have that DTD meta crap in there. But I think you can just do <html> nowadays and it empirically just works. Seriously, screw the anti-DRY people that want me to put some !DOCTYPE or xmlns tags with some W3C links or some DTD nonsense inside ... I should only have to specify "html" exactly once, no more. If I had designed the spec I would have just made it <html version="4.0"> <html version="5.0"> <html version="5.1"> Incredibly more readable, and memorizable. A markup language (literally), by virtue of being a markup language, should not be impossible to memorize. Making scary strings like "-//W3C///DTD" part of the spec is counterproductive.
 - skymt 6y ago
 You don't even need <html>. <https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-html-element https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-ht...> This is a valid HTML5 document: <!doctype html> <title>This is valid!</title> Really, it's valid! Paste it into the validator yourself if you don't believe me: <https://validator.w3.org/nu/#textarea https://validator.w3.org/nu/#textarea>
StreamBright 6y ago
And this is how the web supposed to be.
- kalia35 6y ago
  It is indeed!
- FullMetalBitch 6y ago
  And it looks fine and is perfectly functional. Maybe just tweak the background.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    Looks fine? It is a big blob of undistinguished text. If you squint your eyes everything looks the same. The lack of column widths means your eyes have to do a lot of scanning especially on a bigger/wider screen. The lack of color/font/size differentiation means there's almost no information hierarchy to it. While we all might complain about advertisements and loading times, I for one are very glad we have moved on so significantly.
joemaller1 6y ago
Wish the width was a little narrower, or fluid. Reading on a phone is kind of small.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
IncRnd 6y ago
This looks almost like an RSS feed.
masswerk 6y ago
Great! For even better results, please, set the background-color to `#C0C0C0`. (Netscape default. However, I'm not sure, if this was also the default on Windows, as well.) Compare this bookmarklet: https://www.masswerk.at/bookmarklets/netscapify/ https://www.masswerk.at/bookmarklets/netscapify/
- ArtWomb 6y ago
  Agreed. Blue text on white background is jarring. And I was wondering what the original Netscape Grey was! Argh. Hoping "Godzilla vs Kong" reviews were going to be better. When will Hollywood learn the secret to a good kaiju film = less humans, more monsters ;)
  - masswerk 6y ago
    Only true kaiju on the web: http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/images/tiles.gif http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/images/tiles.gif ;-)
- melicerte 6y ago
  Back in 1995, This is it !
throwaway4good 6y ago
Where is the feed this is based upon from? Google news rss seems to be different and is full with amp links: https://news.google.com/rss?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en https://news.google.com/rss?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
- Bilal_io 6y ago
  Regarding the amp links, they could parse the results and try to replace the amp links
abricot 6y ago
This is great. Google News has been unavailable in my area for years.
_joel 6y ago
I prefer this to the full-fat version anyway, even on modern CPUs. Bookmarked
jrmann100 6y ago
I know I'm the only one who's reading news on the Kindle Voyage, but I'm definitely adding this to my bookmarks list on the e-reader. Super cool!
fermienrico 6y ago
I know this is supposed to be retro but I use NPR text mode always. No pics, just text, its glorious. https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ Far easier to read since the length of the line is absolutely perfect. Pro tip: https://practicaltypography.com/line-length.html https://practicaltypography.com/line-length.html That said - something is wrong with NPR, a bunch of Lorem Ipsum links :)
gedy 6y ago
Subjective, but I wonder if browsers had defaulted to sans serif font instead of serif, people wouldn't complain about "how bad this webpage looks". I get the document origins of course.
artembugara 6y ago
I'm curious where the data get fetched from. The Author mentions that Mozilla Readability and SimplePie are used. Readability to parse the content. SimplePie to fetch the data (I assume). Dat from RSS feeds? In case you want to make something similar, I recently wrote a blog on where you could get news data for free [1] (self-promo) I'd recommend to take a look at my Python package to mine news data from Google News [2]. Also, in 3 days we're releasing an absolutely free News API [3] that will support ~50-100k top stories per day. [1] https://blog.newscatcherapi.com/an-ultimate-list-of-open-sourced-free-tools-to-collect-parse-online-news-articles/ https://blog.newscatcherapi.com/an-ultimate-list-of-open-sou... [2] https://github.com/kotartemiy/pygooglenews https://github.com/kotartemiy/pygooglenews [3] https://newscatcherapi.com/free-news-api https://newscatcherapi.com/free-news-api
drewg123 6y ago
Comparing this to the normal Google News, we have a load time of 450ms vs 6500ms on a fairly beefy workstation. I have a new bookmark..
Thaxll 6y ago
Reminds me of the light CNN version: http://lite.cnn.com/en http://lite.cnn.com/en
- fhsm 6y ago
  or NPR: https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ which I like more b/c the targets of the links have a line width that I find easier to read.
fireeyed 6y ago
Love this. Loads much much faster than Google PWA page.
yegle 6y ago
Not having HTTPS certificate is a nice touch :-)
butz 6y ago
Is meta tag outside of html intentional? HTML 2.0 was way before my webdev days.
- mattowen_uk 6y ago
  I'm going to hazard a guess, that because ancient browsers sometimes displayed html tags they didn't understand, the author has deployed a hack to ensure the correct character encoding is used on a new browsers without soiling the rendering on older systems. Also, I was hoping that 68k.news supported HTTP 1.0, but it doesn't, it's a virtual host on the IP, so needs the host: header variable set, which is HTTP 1.1 - that's a bit of a shame as it means the original browsers such as Mosaic can't access it.
mambodog 6y ago
You can experience this on an (emulated) 68k Mac in your browser using Oldweb.Today: https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#http://68k.news/ https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#http://68k.news/
- debo_ 6y ago
  First impression: "Wow, this warms my heart." Second impression: instinctively tries scrolling with trackpad _help why isn't it working_ This really made my day, thank you for sharing it.
- biggieshellz 6y ago
  Oh wow -- this takes me back to when I first experienced the graphical Internet on a Macintosh IIsi! Thanks!
- reaperducer 6y ago
  "Sorry, OldWeb.today can not run in this emulator in your current browser. Please try the latest version of Chrome or Firefox to use this emulator." Funny that an emulated Mac hates Safari.
willchis 6y ago
This is similar to a site that I built! http://feather.news http://feather.news Best viewed on mobile and you can optionally use a version without images by clicking the link at the top right of the page.
- bobajeff 6y ago
  I like the layout of yours better. But I still like 68k's feature of giving you the readable version of the stories too.
- artembugara 6y ago
  I like it. I'd love to chat about newsapi.org Let me know if you have some time
ape4 6y ago
There are a few html mistakes - stray tags, etc. View source in Firefox colors them red.
gigatexal 6y ago
I like this so much more!
Yhippa 6y ago
My favorite part by far is when you click on a link you see just the plain text of the article sans distractions. Edit: also it shows a few key news articles with related articles. This means I'm not infinitely scrolling which is nice.
- k1m 6y ago
  I work on something called https://txtify.it https://txtify.it that you can prefix onto almost any article URL to get a plain text-only version, e.g. https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/nyregion/remote-work-coronavirus-pandemic.html https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/nyregio...
  - movedx 6y ago
    Love it! It even produces content that supports reader mode (in Firefox, at least.) Now how do I automate this? Maybe a simple bookmarklet? If you paste: var url = document.URL ; var title = document.title ; window.location.href = "https://txtify.it/ https://txtify.it/" + document.URL; into: https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/ https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/ Then drag the bookmarklet to the bookmarks bar, you've got a one-click textify option :)
    - k1m 5y ago
      Very nice! I should add a bookmarklet to the home page.
  - mrunseen 6y ago
    Cool project! My only complain is it defaults font to Courier (monospaced) which is harder to read and takes more place. You might use ‘Georgia’ which is web safe and pretty legible. Or of course, Times New Roman (just like site on this post) Please refer: https://practicaltypography.com/monospaced-fonts.html https://practicaltypography.com/monospaced-fonts.html https://practicaltypography.com/body-text.html https://practicaltypography.com/body-text.html
    - 6y ago
icameron 6y ago
This is perfect! I have news.google.com blocked on my PC because I'm trying to block a bad habit of idly typing it in and getting sucked into the void. Came to HN and still found a way to get the news drip without as much distraction. :)
sharklazer 6y ago
I don't know if you can fix google news after google broke it themselves back in 2011/2012, but this comes close.
darkwizard42 6y ago
I think my favorite part is just how short some of these articles really are once you remove all the nonsense and extra crap in the web pages. Some articles are actually... 8 sentences. That is it. How on earth does it then take 10 seconds to scroll and parse all the fake inserts to finally realize that this is a poorly researched snippet masquerading as news...
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  It’s reasonable to have short articles in a newspaper, where you want to fit in a bunch of short factual stories, or on a newswire where you just want to quickly send out some facts before competitors. In the former case you just put lots of stories on one page. In the latter case, it’s often expected to be short.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    I think short articles are great! But it is crazy how much crap gets added to nice short articles on most sites.
    - tachyonbeam 6y ago
      I guess a lot of the BS filler text is added just so they can fit more ads around the text, huh? The goal for online publications isn't to inform you and save you time... It's to make you click on ads. They want to have you see as many ads as possible, and make sure that you stay on the page as long as possible. If the news article was just a one-paragraph snippet, you couldn't fit 8 ads on the page, it would look absolutely laughable.
      - ljm 6y ago
        A newspaper or news website would source most of their journalism from Reuters or Associated Press, and then fluff it up to fit their editorial stance. The same articles would seem longer in print because they're formatted in such narrow columns, wrapping around images. There's some thought that goes into the layout. Of course, the internet breaks that particular illusion. And I'm sure that if a marketing department could do to their printed paper what they do to their website, design and readability be damned, they would jump at the chance.
AltruisticGapHN 6y ago
Needs a very light gray background. To be devil's advocate, I feel like those serif fonts were easier to read on a low resolution monitor because they were sharper due to the pixels being very apparent. Here not even on a 4K, I find it difficult to read the headlines.
alex_young 6y ago
Reminds me of text only CNN: http://lite.cnn.com/en http://lite.cnn.com/en
cmiller1 6y ago
This is wonderful! As pages get more bloated and new crypto is used for https my old computers lose access to more and more of the web, bookmarking this to browse from mac os 9 later on today.
twobitshifter 6y ago
Neat project. I use NetNewsWire for rss. It’s interesting that the format people prefer to consume news in versus the format that news is delivered in are now so different. Newspapers went through the same thing. The older papers are all stories and were funded through the price of the paper, then ads invaded the margins.
- msla 6y ago
  > The older papers are all stories and were funded through the price of the paper, then ads invaded the margins. I assure you 19th Century newspapers had advertisements. For example: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86072192/1897-08-01/ed-1/seq-3/ https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86072192/1897-08-0... And an 18th Century newspaper with advertisements: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83021183/1777-03-06/ed-1/seq-4/ https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83021183/1777-03-0... How far back do you go to find newspapers with no advertisements?
jjordan 6y ago
Any chance of providing an RSS feed? The plaintext nature of the actual articles is delightful.
spiritplumber 6y ago
This is beautiful. Everything should have a text mode like this. I should make it an option for my own site, and I will! Thank you for the inspiration.
knodi123 6y ago
I didn't know the tag was that old! Also thought a page from back then would be ascii instead of utf8. (Also, I thought every page from that era was required to have at least one <blink> tag, and possibly an "Under Construction" image.)
skyfaller 6y ago
Now, here's a web page that NetSurf has no trouble with!
franklampard 6y ago
eeew
rkagerer 6y ago
What a breath of fresh air. I forgot how human-friendly the internet was before ads invaded.
gmurphy 6y ago
Nostaliga really kicked in here - seeing things like this for the first time, and feeling the unfurling of the future and a thousand new ideas in front of you, one so new and beyond all of your sci-fi expectations, and yet so real. I feel so incredibly fortunate to have been old enough to see and understand the start of all of this, and later, to be a part of all of it.
- gdubs 6y ago
  I’m with you. As soon as that page loaded I had warm flashbacks to my first days exploring the early web with Netscape. Incredibly magical time.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I don’t think I had any feelings of nostalgia related to this at all, even though it must have been about when I started using the web. I guess I was still too young to get really attched to it.
  - gmurphy 6y ago
    When I looked at it before it had a Netscape-gray background; now it's white (updated? different browser? experiment?) and so doesn't capture that same feeling at all
- wyclif 6y ago
  I appreciate hard-hitting, important news like this: https://imgur.com/a/Yh0rZ12 https://imgur.com/a/Yh0rZ12
movedx 6y ago
It's so Netscape 1.1 it doesn't even use HTTPS. Love it.
peanutz454 6y ago
I did not know that google news is not available in Spain https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9609687?hl=en https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9609...
rocky1138 6y ago
I would love it if this kicked off a "slow food" web movement where we all built a ton of services usable by retro hardware.
exabrial 6y ago
Wow. Load times are incredible and no stupid node.js present
totetsu 6y ago
looks good in lynx
agumonkey 6y ago
You must now explain what you used to get such eye blinking fast speed. Surely it's a new technology.
- busymom0 6y ago
  Based on the network request, it's a single 24.88KB HTML file hosted on nginx and a cache HIT status and current age of 725 seconds. There's no CSS, JS etc. The HTML file is pure html from what I can tell with no inline CSS/JS. I achieved something similar for my site by putting the HTML file generated every few minutes on a single S3 bucket and putting CloudFlare in front with caching page rule on the HTML too (by default HTML is not cached by CF).
sneak 6y ago
I was just the other day wishing for a no-nonsense headlines site like this. Thank you!
jkaljundi 6y ago
Remember doing a news site back in 1994. This is exactly like it looked. Much before Netscape and MCC though ;)
dingosity 6y ago
Oh my. It's quite beautiful in lynx.
soylentgraham 6y ago
This is the website we need for that 32" e-ink newspaper we're all planning
FerretFred 5y ago
This is great! I so don't miss the err, personalization and targeted content. If you can track down RSS news sources I'd recommend having a look at Newsbeuter https://github.com/akrennmair/newsbeuter https://github.com/akrennmair/newsbeuter
jupake 6y ago
This is the perfect way to deliver factual news. To the point, no fluff. No wasted time.
kgin 5y ago
God I love this. Pops up instantly, content is the only thing on the page.
dredmorbius 5y ago
I assembled a similar decruftifier for the Washington Post specifically, using html-xml-utils (https://www.w3.org/Tools/HTML-XML-utils https://www.w3.org/Tools/HTML-XML-utils -- and some sed/awk) to strip only core article content & metadata (head, byline, dateline). Result was typically <5% of original HTML. I've come to realise that most online commercial publishing does not even use bold within body text, giving another filter trigger for stripping cruft.
kylewatson 5y ago
This is great! And retro, your channel seems cool. I think I have a 3com Audrey Ergo in the closet if my wife didn't toss it. It you're interested I'll send it to you.
stuaxo 5y ago
I like that it's much easier to not click on these. Maybe it's just because the colour scheme somehow makes it less interesting.

404 points by gripfx 6y ago

Interview with the founder on the Register[0] [0] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/29/google_news_netscape_port/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/29/google_news_netscape_...

k1m 6y ago
Thanks for the link. Technical part from that interview: > On a technical level, the site obtains stories through the existing Google News RSS feed, which are then processed with some PHP trickery. "Google News has a very nice RSS feed, for each topic, language and country. So I thought I could connect to that feed, and write some code to simplify the result way down to extremely basic HTML, targeting only tags available in the HTML 2.0 specification from 1995," said Malseed. > "So I used a PHP library called SimplePie to import the feed, and wrote some PHP code to simplify the results into a nice front page, using Netscape 2.0.2 on my 1989 Mac SE/30 to make sure it loaded fast and looked nice. The articles were a little more difficult, because they are on all sorts of different news sites with different formatting. > "So I found that Mozilla has an open-source library called Readability, which is what powers Firefox's reader mode. I used the PHP port of this, and then wrote a proxy that renders articles through Readability, and then I added some code to strip the results down even further to extremely basic HTML."

whalesalad 6y ago

This is great. I have been looking for a "world news in the style of techmeme" that isn't the drudge report.

tiborsaas 6y ago

Very retro with all those tags, but that's the job of CSS :) Edit: there was no CSS support in 1.1 :)

icedchai 6y ago
Yep, CSS wasn't really supported anywhere until 1997. Most places were still using font tags and table-based layouts for quite a while after.
- jandrese 6y ago
  And in the 90s CSS was unreliable and often difficult to use. Internet Explorer made it difficult to go full CSS for a long time.
  - icedchai 6y ago
    I still think CSS is difficult to use. Out of HTML/CSS/JS, I despise CSS the most.
    - drummojg 6y ago
      It's what drove me out of wanting to work in Web authoring. I looked at CSS and literally decided "I am not going to learn this."
      - icedchai 6y ago
        It has gotten a bit better. The early CSS era (floats, etc) was worse than tables, I thought.
        jandrese 6y ago
        Early CSS had a huge problem with this. "Don't use tables, use CSS!" was a big message. But CSS's tools for tabular layout were extremely poor and difficult to use, leading to much frustration. It was a joke how hard it was to create a simple responsive three column layout in CSS, a thing easily accomplished with tables and very common on the web. Getting that three column layout right seemed like black magic in CSS1.

tyingq 6y ago

Looks/works nice in lynx (text browser) as well, where google news itself does not. Bookmarked.

every 6y ago
Works nicely in links2 as well... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)

alpb 6y ago

It would be great to get this working on each of our personalized Google News feed. But I suspect it would require either a userscript stylesheet or Google sign-in (if that even gives you a personalized feed).

throwaway823882 6y ago

Considering the content, maybe it should be renamed "Google Trivia". It's like a bad version of Reddit with no comments for context/addl information.

pcdoodle 6y ago

Super cool. SE/30's are amazing machines. Does HN render on netscape <= V4?

helfire 6y ago
Pretty ok - https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#https://news.ycombinator.com https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#https://news.ycombinat...

eljimmy 6y ago

Viewing the source of that webpage really takes you back. Plain old HTML. It's nostalgic beauty. I recently fixed up an old 486 I purchased off eBay but it was bittersweet when I managed to get it connected to the 'net. Most websites were inaccessible due to the lack of support for today's encryption protocols, those that were had numerous JavaScript issues.

dheera 6y ago
Except this bullshit: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <html> Back in the day, you only needed: <html>
- jhgb 6y ago
 Don't you only need <!DOCTYPE html> <html> these days? That's slightly worse but not terribly so IMO.
 - dheera 6y ago
 Oh I actually quoted the website's source. They have that DTD meta crap in there. But I think you can just do <html> nowadays and it empirically just works. Seriously, screw the anti-DRY people that want me to put some !DOCTYPE or xmlns tags with some W3C links or some DTD nonsense inside ... I should only have to specify "html" exactly once, no more. If I had designed the spec I would have just made it <html version="4.0"> <html version="5.0"> <html version="5.1"> Incredibly more readable, and memorizable. A markup language (literally), by virtue of being a markup language, should not be impossible to memorize. Making scary strings like "-//W3C///DTD" part of the spec is counterproductive.
 - skymt 6y ago
 You don't even need <html>. <https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-html-element https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-ht...> This is a valid HTML5 document: <!doctype html> <title>This is valid!</title> Really, it's valid! Paste it into the validator yourself if you don't believe me: <https://validator.w3.org/nu/#textarea https://validator.w3.org/nu/#textarea>

StreamBright 6y ago

And this is how the web supposed to be.

kalia35 6y ago
It is indeed!
FullMetalBitch 6y ago
And it looks fine and is perfectly functional. Maybe just tweak the background.
- azinman2 6y ago
  Looks fine? It is a big blob of undistinguished text. If you squint your eyes everything looks the same. The lack of column widths means your eyes have to do a lot of scanning especially on a bigger/wider screen. The lack of color/font/size differentiation means there's almost no information hierarchy to it. While we all might complain about advertisements and loading times, I for one are very glad we have moved on so significantly.

joemaller1 6y ago

Wish the width was a little narrower, or fluid. Reading on a phone is kind of small.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

IncRnd 6y ago

This looks almost like an RSS feed.

masswerk 6y ago

Great! For even better results, please, set the background-color to `#C0C0C0`. (Netscape default. However, I'm not sure, if this was also the default on Windows, as well.) Compare this bookmarklet: https://www.masswerk.at/bookmarklets/netscapify/ https://www.masswerk.at/bookmarklets/netscapify/

ArtWomb 6y ago
Agreed. Blue text on white background is jarring. And I was wondering what the original Netscape Grey was! Argh. Hoping "Godzilla vs Kong" reviews were going to be better. When will Hollywood learn the secret to a good kaiju film = less humans, more monsters ;)
- masswerk 6y ago
  Only true kaiju on the web: http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/images/tiles.gif http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/images/tiles.gif ;-)
melicerte 6y ago
Back in 1995, This is it !

throwaway4good 6y ago

Where is the feed this is based upon from? Google news rss seems to be different and is full with amp links: https://news.google.com/rss?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en https://news.google.com/rss?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en

Bilal_io 6y ago
Regarding the amp links, they could parse the results and try to replace the amp links

abricot 6y ago

This is great. Google News has been unavailable in my area for years.

_joel 6y ago

I prefer this to the full-fat version anyway, even on modern CPUs. Bookmarked

jrmann100 6y ago

I know I'm the only one who's reading news on the Kindle Voyage, but I'm definitely adding this to my bookmarks list on the e-reader. Super cool!

fermienrico 6y ago

I know this is supposed to be retro but I use NPR text mode always. No pics, just text, its glorious. https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ Far easier to read since the length of the line is absolutely perfect. Pro tip: https://practicaltypography.com/line-length.html https://practicaltypography.com/line-length.html That said - something is wrong with NPR, a bunch of Lorem Ipsum links :)

gedy 6y ago

Subjective, but I wonder if browsers had defaulted to sans serif font instead of serif, people wouldn't complain about "how bad this webpage looks". I get the document origins of course.

artembugara 6y ago

I'm curious where the data get fetched from. The Author mentions that Mozilla Readability and SimplePie are used. Readability to parse the content. SimplePie to fetch the data (I assume). Dat from RSS feeds? In case you want to make something similar, I recently wrote a blog on where you could get news data for free [1] (self-promo) I'd recommend to take a look at my Python package to mine news data from Google News [2]. Also, in 3 days we're releasing an absolutely free News API [3] that will support ~50-100k top stories per day. [1] https://blog.newscatcherapi.com/an-ultimate-list-of-open-sourced-free-tools-to-collect-parse-online-news-articles/ https://blog.newscatcherapi.com/an-ultimate-list-of-open-sou... [2] https://github.com/kotartemiy/pygooglenews https://github.com/kotartemiy/pygooglenews [3] https://newscatcherapi.com/free-news-api https://newscatcherapi.com/free-news-api

drewg123 6y ago

Comparing this to the normal Google News, we have a load time of 450ms vs 6500ms on a fairly beefy workstation. I have a new bookmark..

Thaxll 6y ago

Reminds me of the light CNN version: http://lite.cnn.com/en http://lite.cnn.com/en

fhsm 6y ago
or NPR: https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ which I like more b/c the targets of the links have a line width that I find easier to read.

fireeyed 6y ago

Love this. Loads much much faster than Google PWA page.

yegle 6y ago

Not having HTTPS certificate is a nice touch :-)

butz 6y ago

Is meta tag outside of html intentional? HTML 2.0 was way before my webdev days.

mattowen_uk 6y ago
I'm going to hazard a guess, that because ancient browsers sometimes displayed html tags they didn't understand, the author has deployed a hack to ensure the correct character encoding is used on a new browsers without soiling the rendering on older systems. Also, I was hoping that 68k.news supported HTTP 1.0, but it doesn't, it's a virtual host on the IP, so needs the host: header variable set, which is HTTP 1.1 - that's a bit of a shame as it means the original browsers such as Mosaic can't access it.

mambodog 6y ago

You can experience this on an (emulated) 68k Mac in your browser using Oldweb.Today: https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#http://68k.news/ https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#http://68k.news/

debo_ 6y ago
First impression: "Wow, this warms my heart." Second impression: instinctively tries scrolling with trackpad _help why isn't it working_ This really made my day, thank you for sharing it.
biggieshellz 6y ago
Oh wow -- this takes me back to when I first experienced the graphical Internet on a Macintosh IIsi! Thanks!
reaperducer 6y ago
"Sorry, OldWeb.today can not run in this emulator in your current browser. Please try the latest version of Chrome or Firefox to use this emulator." Funny that an emulated Mac hates Safari.

willchis 6y ago

This is similar to a site that I built! http://feather.news http://feather.news Best viewed on mobile and you can optionally use a version without images by clicking the link at the top right of the page.

bobajeff 6y ago
I like the layout of yours better. But I still like 68k's feature of giving you the readable version of the stories too.
artembugara 6y ago
I like it. I'd love to chat about newsapi.org Let me know if you have some time

ape4 6y ago

There are a few html mistakes - stray tags, etc. View source in Firefox colors them red.

gigatexal 6y ago

I like this so much more!

Yhippa 6y ago

My favorite part by far is when you click on a link you see just the plain text of the article sans distractions. Edit: also it shows a few key news articles with related articles. This means I'm not infinitely scrolling which is nice.

k1m 6y ago
I work on something called https://txtify.it https://txtify.it that you can prefix onto almost any article URL to get a plain text-only version, e.g. https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/nyregion/remote-work-coronavirus-pandemic.html https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/nyregio...
- movedx 6y ago
  Love it! It even produces content that supports reader mode (in Firefox, at least.) Now how do I automate this? Maybe a simple bookmarklet? If you paste: var url = document.URL ; var title = document.title ; window.location.href = "https://txtify.it/ https://txtify.it/" + document.URL; into: https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/ https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/ Then drag the bookmarklet to the bookmarks bar, you've got a one-click textify option :)
  - k1m 5y ago
    Very nice! I should add a bookmarklet to the home page.
- mrunseen 6y ago
  Cool project! My only complain is it defaults font to Courier (monospaced) which is harder to read and takes more place. You might use ‘Georgia’ which is web safe and pretty legible. Or of course, Times New Roman (just like site on this post) Please refer: https://practicaltypography.com/monospaced-fonts.html https://practicaltypography.com/monospaced-fonts.html https://practicaltypography.com/body-text.html https://practicaltypography.com/body-text.html
  - 6y ago

icameron 6y ago

This is perfect! I have news.google.com blocked on my PC because I'm trying to block a bad habit of idly typing it in and getting sucked into the void. Came to HN and still found a way to get the news drip without as much distraction. :)

sharklazer 6y ago

I don't know if you can fix google news after google broke it themselves back in 2011/2012, but this comes close.

darkwizard42 6y ago

I think my favorite part is just how short some of these articles really are once you remove all the nonsense and extra crap in the web pages. Some articles are actually... 8 sentences. That is it. How on earth does it then take 10 seconds to scroll and parse all the fake inserts to finally realize that this is a poorly researched snippet masquerading as news...

dan-robertson 6y ago
It’s reasonable to have short articles in a newspaper, where you want to fit in a bunch of short factual stories, or on a newswire where you just want to quickly send out some facts before competitors. In the former case you just put lots of stories on one page. In the latter case, it’s often expected to be short.
- kevincox 6y ago
  I think short articles are great! But it is crazy how much crap gets added to nice short articles on most sites.
  - tachyonbeam 6y ago
    I guess a lot of the BS filler text is added just so they can fit more ads around the text, huh? The goal for online publications isn't to inform you and save you time... It's to make you click on ads. They want to have you see as many ads as possible, and make sure that you stay on the page as long as possible. If the news article was just a one-paragraph snippet, you couldn't fit 8 ads on the page, it would look absolutely laughable.
    - ljm 6y ago
      A newspaper or news website would source most of their journalism from Reuters or Associated Press, and then fluff it up to fit their editorial stance. The same articles would seem longer in print because they're formatted in such narrow columns, wrapping around images. There's some thought that goes into the layout. Of course, the internet breaks that particular illusion. And I'm sure that if a marketing department could do to their printed paper what they do to their website, design and readability be damned, they would jump at the chance.

AltruisticGapHN 6y ago

Needs a very light gray background. To be devil's advocate, I feel like those serif fonts were easier to read on a low resolution monitor because they were sharper due to the pixels being very apparent. Here not even on a 4K, I find it difficult to read the headlines.

alex_young 6y ago

Reminds me of text only CNN: http://lite.cnn.com/en http://lite.cnn.com/en

cmiller1 6y ago

This is wonderful! As pages get more bloated and new crypto is used for https my old computers lose access to more and more of the web, bookmarking this to browse from mac os 9 later on today.

twobitshifter 6y ago

Neat project. I use NetNewsWire for rss. It’s interesting that the format people prefer to consume news in versus the format that news is delivered in are now so different. Newspapers went through the same thing. The older papers are all stories and were funded through the price of the paper, then ads invaded the margins.

msla 6y ago
> The older papers are all stories and were funded through the price of the paper, then ads invaded the margins. I assure you 19th Century newspapers had advertisements. For example: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86072192/1897-08-01/ed-1/seq-3/ https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86072192/1897-08-0... And an 18th Century newspaper with advertisements: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83021183/1777-03-06/ed-1/seq-4/ https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83021183/1777-03-0... How far back do you go to find newspapers with no advertisements?

jjordan 6y ago

Any chance of providing an RSS feed? The plaintext nature of the actual articles is delightful.

spiritplumber 6y ago

This is beautiful. Everything should have a text mode like this. I should make it an option for my own site, and I will! Thank you for the inspiration.

knodi123 6y ago

I didn't know the tag was that old! Also thought a page from back then would be ascii instead of utf8. (Also, I thought every page from that era was required to have at least one <blink> tag, and possibly an "Under Construction" image.)

skyfaller 6y ago

Now, here's a web page that NetSurf has no trouble with!

franklampard 6y ago

eeew

rkagerer 6y ago

What a breath of fresh air. I forgot how human-friendly the internet was before ads invaded.

gmurphy 6y ago

Nostaliga really kicked in here - seeing things like this for the first time, and feeling the unfurling of the future and a thousand new ideas in front of you, one so new and beyond all of your sci-fi expectations, and yet so real. I feel so incredibly fortunate to have been old enough to see and understand the start of all of this, and later, to be a part of all of it.

gdubs 6y ago
I’m with you. As soon as that page loaded I had warm flashbacks to my first days exploring the early web with Netscape. Incredibly magical time.
Aeolun 6y ago
I don’t think I had any feelings of nostalgia related to this at all, even though it must have been about when I started using the web. I guess I was still too young to get really attched to it.
- gmurphy 6y ago
  When I looked at it before it had a Netscape-gray background; now it's white (updated? different browser? experiment?) and so doesn't capture that same feeling at all
wyclif 6y ago
I appreciate hard-hitting, important news like this: https://imgur.com/a/Yh0rZ12 https://imgur.com/a/Yh0rZ12

movedx 6y ago

It's so Netscape 1.1 it doesn't even use HTTPS. Love it.

peanutz454 6y ago

I did not know that google news is not available in Spain https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9609687?hl=en https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9609...

rocky1138 6y ago

I would love it if this kicked off a "slow food" web movement where we all built a ton of services usable by retro hardware.

exabrial 6y ago

Wow. Load times are incredible and no stupid node.js present

totetsu 6y ago

looks good in lynx

agumonkey 6y ago

You must now explain what you used to get such eye blinking fast speed. Surely it's a new technology.

busymom0 6y ago
Based on the network request, it's a single 24.88KB HTML file hosted on nginx and a cache HIT status and current age of 725 seconds. There's no CSS, JS etc. The HTML file is pure html from what I can tell with no inline CSS/JS. I achieved something similar for my site by putting the HTML file generated every few minutes on a single S3 bucket and putting CloudFlare in front with caching page rule on the HTML too (by default HTML is not cached by CF).

sneak 6y ago

I was just the other day wishing for a no-nonsense headlines site like this. Thank you!

jkaljundi 6y ago

Remember doing a news site back in 1994. This is exactly like it looked. Much before Netscape and MCC though ;)

dingosity 6y ago

Oh my. It's quite beautiful in lynx.

soylentgraham 6y ago

This is the website we need for that 32" e-ink newspaper we're all planning

FerretFred 5y ago

This is great! I so don't miss the err, personalization and targeted content. If you can track down RSS news sources I'd recommend having a look at Newsbeuter https://github.com/akrennmair/newsbeuter https://github.com/akrennmair/newsbeuter

jupake 6y ago

This is the perfect way to deliver factual news. To the point, no fluff. No wasted time.

kgin 5y ago

God I love this. Pops up instantly, content is the only thing on the page.

dredmorbius 5y ago

I assembled a similar decruftifier for the Washington Post specifically, using html-xml-utils (https://www.w3.org/Tools/HTML-XML-utils https://www.w3.org/Tools/HTML-XML-utils -- and some sed/awk) to strip only core article content & metadata (head, byline, dateline). Result was typically <5% of original HTML. I've come to realise that most online commercial publishing does not even use bold within body text, giving another filter trigger for stripping cruft.

kylewatson 5y ago

This is great! And retro, your channel seems cool. I think I have a 3com Audrey Ergo in the closet if my wife didn't toss it. It you're interested I'll send it to you.

stuaxo 5y ago

I like that it's much easier to not click on these. Maybe it's just because the colour scheme somehow makes it less interesting.