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I'm surprised that more effort hasn't gone into hacking on "line mode" (terminal-based) Web browsers—esp. for reading developer documentation—and absence of the
by cxr 5y ago
I'm surprised that more effort hasn't gone into hacking on "line mode" (terminal-based) Web browsers—esp. for reading developer documentation—and absence of the resulting effect that this should have among hackers on their own sites.
I find most people who consider their projects to be "no-frills" have quite a few frills indeed. This includes personal blogs, but Sourcehut and the constant praise for its "clean" UI is one other example of this sort of thing. Load it up in w3m or Lynx and it very much feels like a site intended to be read in a conventional desktop browser but filtered and constrained to a text-only medium.
Actually clean design would start with, "How would I expect this to feel if I made a custom, terminal-based (but not command-line driven) Sourcehut client?" and then figuring out the appropriate markup you'd need to spit out to achieve that in a line mode browser that understands the basics—forms, content ordering, etc.
(PS: Now transport that same artifact to a conventional browser. Is the experience better or worse that what's currently available?)