Text-only NPR

132ms to load the whole page for me. Over half that time (76ms) spent establishing the connection and negotiating TLS. TTFB only 18 milliseconds once the connection was established. No adds, no pop ups, fully accessible, cache friendly, and virtually free to host and maintain.

For a public news organization that doesn't need to desperately push their brand onto people or track a user's every breath, this is a great thing to provide, even if most people would consider it "ugly".

Lite sites are just the best. Hacker news, cnn, this, hell even Drudge Report. It’s user friendly. It’s classic. It’s fast. Even with limited ads it’s just a frustration free way to consume info

First, I think there should be a browser extension that rewrites links for various new sites from the bloated pages to these simple pages.

Second, I think it is ironic that one of the major justifications for javascript on web pages is that itcan be used to optimize the page. For example, javascript can be used to reduce the need for a full page reload, reduce roundtrips when interacting with the page, only update the parts of the page that actually change, etc. [Edit: I think a good example of this is Hacker News itself, where upvotes initiate a full page reload if javascript is disabled, but simple send an asynchronous request and update the page otherwise.] This justification is trading off additional complexity and violation of the simple application model provided by html and the related concept of Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State (HATEOAS) where clients are dumb and simple allow users to follow links and submit forms in a standardized way, for micro optimizations. However, these micro-optimizations are basically nullified by the hundreds of kilobytes of tracking software and visual gizmos that content providers are stuffing in their pages, and the ever increasing internet speeds and bandwidth. Make web pages dumb (and fast) again!

Similarly: http://lite.cnn.io/en

The text-only website is just perfect to read in the CLI environment using lynx. No ads, no distractions, just the contents. Definitely underrated.

The only problem I've found is that if you reject cookies form their main site it boots you to this homepage instead of whatever article you were on.

There is a similar site for TED Talks too.

https://en.tiny.ted.com/talks

It's great. I wish when you choose text-only after clicking a link to NPR it took you to the desired page instead of the homepage.