31 ms·
Several news sites offer text only versions. https://lite.cnn.com/ https://lite.cnn.com/ https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ https://wttr.in/ https:/
by treesknees 9mo ago
Several news sites offer text only versions.
https://lite.cnn.com/ https://lite.cnn.com/
https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/
https://wttr.in/ https://wttr.in/
More listed at https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites
It’d be great if there was some standard that allowed these to be easily found, and supported on the local news sites.
- bryant 9mo agoI miss RSS.
- joshribakoff 9mo agoThanks for sharing, i almost was not sure if the last part was sarcasm. Html itself was the standard, then when it got bloated we got rss. This seems like it’s not a problem of a lack of standards. It’s the company choosing not to promote it.
- johncolanduoni 9mo agoRSS is just a list of links to webpages, maybe with summaries. The readers generally fetch those webpages and filter out the text, but every browser has equivalent functionality now. You can do it with literally any HTML page, though some websites try to fight it (since depending on the reader, it neuters ads).
- what 9mo agoRSS feeds used to contain the full article. That changed when everyone wanted to monetize their blogs.
- manuelmoreale 9mo agoRSS still contains full articles on a lot of personal sites. As you said, it’s about monetisation and control and when you’re writing with no plan to monetize there’s no point in not serving full content.
- johncolanduoni 9mo agoYeah, and that’s my point. The problem is not technological, you can make a super readable HTML site by just putting text in <p> tags, and RSS readers for blogs that didn’t rug-pull their content still work fine. People lost interest in giving out something for nothing, so now the web is an ad-infested mess. If someone makes a new tech that makes that impossible, 10 principled FSF-enjoyers will write content for it and nobody else. Web standard bloat is bad, but it didn’t cause this problem, and you can’t fix it by creating a new spec.
- treesknees 9mo agoI suppose I meant more of a best practice - if every news site could be found at the subdomain of lite.XYZ.com, or perhaps some way for the browser to request specifically no images or styles, it’d be easier for the end user to find. RSS is a good point that I didn’t consider. Although it tends to be a summary and hyperlink to the main site.
- QuantumNomad_ 9mo agoIt’s too bad that WML from WAP is not used anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol WML pages had mostly text and hyperlinks from what I remember and even though it supported images too I think most such basic pages would be readable even if you turned image loading off.
- duggan 9mo agoI spent so much time tuning the WAP site for the forum I worked for back in 2008. I had some sort of Nokia running on whatever 2kbps networking was going then, and would shave absolutely anything I could to make the forums load slightly faster.
- IanCal 9mo agoWe could use markdown.
- ahazred8ta 9mo agoIt's a crying shame that a browser can't fetch a plain vanilla goodstuff.md file and display it natively.
- IanCal 9mo agoIdeally IMO this would be accept headers. You're asking for the same semantic content but a different format. I'm not sure if there's a nice way of specifying html but in a minimal sense (we do quality with images, perhaps linked), however these could mostly be text/plain or text/markdown (and it'd be nice if that was then formatted properly by the browser). This often makes a really nice API if you can do other formats too - the main page of cnn could respond to rss accept headers and give me a feed for example.
- WackyFighter 9mo agoIt is more to do with the fact that vast majority of people aren't going to bother subscribing to an RSS feed. I am on a freelancer slack group that supposed to have a RSS feed for jobs. The feed is often broken for weeks because most people don't use it. Even when it isn't broken the display output is broken in Thunderbird because the dev isn't going to bother checking Thunderbird as many people don't use email clients like that anymore and instead use webmail. I never have used RSS that much as normally if I want to check for new things on a site, I will just go to the site and look myself.
- dddrh 9mo agoUsing the lite subdomain is a great way to read all the subscriber articles as well. Was reminded of the lite site during some annoyingly aggressive A/B testing CNN was doing a few months back.
- Dwedit 9mo agoI looked at a CNN "lite" article, and it includes 560KB of stuff (lots and lots of CSS declarations) in addition to the actual 11KB of article content.
- zamadatix 9mo agoWhile still wasteful, CSS is one of those things you can do astronomically wrong before it starts being noticeable. Case in point here: inlining 560 kb of CSS with the page and just sending it with the entire HTML file each time is only ~61 kb of actual network transfer to load the article (due to brotli encoding).
- sva_ 9mo agoFor me in Firefox it only loads the article's HTML (50-70kb) and the favicon (7kb). Are you sure it isn't some addon you have?
- pandemic_region 9mo agoIt could be the cookie banner appearing.
- IanCal 9mo agoIt is, the content loads first, then the js for the cookie banner, then the favicon. If the js fails to load (I blocked the request as a test) the page loads just fine, it isn't blocked by that.
- reddalo 9mo agoI bet you're using uBlock Origin
- zamadatix 9mo agoThe articles HTML is ~60 kb compressed and ~10x that uncompressed, which accounts for both apparent sizes.
- iberator 9mo ago
- amelius 9mo agoMaybe there could be a service which translates any website into a trimmed-down text-only version.
- jayknight 9mo agoFirefox's Reader mode is pretty great. Doesn't reduce network traffic but makes almost any page more readable.
- arianvanp 9mo agoIn the Netherlands the public broadcaster still publishes news through Teletekst: https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-teletekst-de-nos-over-het-gloednieuwe-oude-systeem.html https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-...
- Cthulhu_ 9mo agoWhich is cool but it's not web, and few people have working TV reception that supports it at the moment. The web version of Teletekst (https://nos.nl/teletekst https://nos.nl/teletekst) is over 3 MB in size.
- kqr 9mo agoAre there no APIs with smaller and faster responses? The Swedish equivalent has --even a fairly respectable terminal client.
- arianvanp 9mo agoIt's better than web! You don't usually view it with Internet. You view it with either an antenna or with broadcast cable. It's up even when the Internet is down.
- webdevver 9mo ago> https://wttr.in/ https://wttr.in/ didnt load for me
- ashu1461 9mo agoGoogle also used to have a go app which they deprecated later on, while now i think about it what is the use of having a go app, if the websites which are shown in search results are not optimised for slower networks.
- ultratalk 9mo agoDuckDuckGo has a js-free version of their website at https://html.duckduckgo.com/ https://html.duckduckgo.com/
- The_Double 9mo agoThat CNN website is great, except it still has a huge cookie banner. Looking at the cookies of the site, I think the only cookie it sets is that i clicked on the banner. Most of the size of the page is also related to the banner it seems.
- transcriptase 9mo agoYou can’t put a price on some round-rim glasses wearing EU bureaucrat named Klaus-Dietrich von Regulieren sleeping soundly because of that banner.
- phantasmish 9mo agoIf I’ve understood the grandparent post correctly, they don’t need the banner. They wouldn’t need it if the only cookie they set were a functional 1st-party cookie, and since that sole cookie is just to track cookie banner status, they especially don’t need it.
- miningape 9mo agoBut taking the time to investigate that, get it approved by legal, etc. all takes longer than just slapping a cookie banner component on it. This is why people complain about the unclear and bureaucratic nature of these laws, it leads to an over complicated investigation and compliance isn't always simple - meaning the safest option is to comply at the highest level and degrade the user experience.
- Macacity 9mo agoBut it is not. the text of that legislation is very clear.
- reorder9695 9mo agoYes but the only thing better than being compliant is being compliant twice over so there's absolutely no debate about compliance.
- ignoramous 9mo ago> great if there was some standard that allowed these to be easily found Too bad Google sunset Chrome Flywheel (likely after AMP?): https://research.google/pubs/flywheel-googles-data-compression-proxy-for-the-mobile-web/ https://research.google/pubs/flywheel-googles-data-compressi... Opera Mini Turbo was equally popular during 2G/Edge era.
- sdeframond 9mo agoWell, there is RSS.
- ignoramous 9mo agohttps://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite
- imgabe 9mo agoIn terms of a standard, it would be nice if "reader mode" were standardized to request a text-only minimal formatting version of the site.
- Fnoord 9mo ago$ ssh teletekst.nl
- paulcapewell 9mo agooh my god.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo agoI view every website as text-only I can reformat the text any way I like