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Comment by volandovengo | Hacker News Reader

This lite.cnn site is awesome! Text without ads & trackers that bloat the cnn.com site.

I've been using it since the Raspberry Pi 3 days (before rpi 4 came about) because ads affected them so severely. And now that we have the pi4 that can handle the load, I still have not changed from reading CNN from the lite page. And that has carried over to all my other devices. I just Google the title if I want to see pictures or video in the article.

I used to do the same with Twitter, but these days there is nearly no difference between the mobile and the regular versions.

It would do well with a tiny amount of additional CSS to make it work well on large screens, but I guess they don't want to make it too nice to use for that segment.

IIRC, this site was put together, in particular, for low-bandwidth users (like mobile phone users back in the feature phone day) where every byte cost. CSS would be an unnecessary and potentially expensive addition for those users.

The website already serves a 496 byte CSS file (359 minified, even less gzipped), addition of a max-width to make it readable on large screens wouldn't make a difference.

It's not optimized to that level. There's 1.1k of inline tracking javascript. And a reference to an external stylesheet for the styling, along with a bunch of wastefully long hex identifiers.

Took a look at the dev console, there are 2 tracking scripts, segment and CNN specific one. Those take up the majority of bandwidth. There's also a separate CSS style sheet. The main DOM and the stylesheet are <10% of the total bytes transferred. The favicon is the same byte size as the entire DOM.

Don't think there is necessarily a consideration of byte cost, given the size of the tracking scripts. A few lines to make this manageable on wide monitors aren't prohibitive for those users.

Ouch, I'm surprised they added those. Definitely defeats the original purpose of these low-bandwidth sites.

It doesn't - it's still pretty compact. Would still be pretty compact after adding ~30 bytes for making it work well with large screens.

Yeah just two adjustments makes it infinitely more readable on a 1080p monitor, body { max-width: 768px; margin: 0 auto; }

I read HN on Kindle[1], So low bloat websites like these are always a pleasure to read on Kindle's forever experimental browser.

The websites needn't be text only, Reducing useless elements like Techcrunch's content wrap can go a long way to improve readability and accessibility.

[1] https://hntokindle.com/ (Disclaimer: I built this)

One hopes that soon we'll discover technology to display X kb of text without also loading 100X kb of Javascript.

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