The beauty of a text only webpage | Hacker News Reader

The beauty of a text only webpage

albanbrooke.com

319 pointsspeckx185 comments

Maybe one of my favorite examples

Another well known one and particularly interesting since it's one of the most valuable companies in the world and this is their real website and not something they've just kept for historical purposes or something. https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

I would pay good money to watch a clear-glasses-framed youngster pitch Buffet on turning the BH website into a progressive web app.

Lots of examples here (although many do have some amount of styling): https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html

https://lite.cnn.com/ for news. Especially on mobile.

Also https://text.npr.org/

http://68k.news/

This one is a Godsend during natural disasters when power and wifi is out but you still have some cell access and want to know what's happening.

The (non-compliant) cookie banner covering half the screen kinda ruins the mood.

Hmm, I don't see that (in USA, on Safari/iOS with no extra ad block).

call your representatives

Wow. That’s really nice. Almost good enough to make me consider it for my daily news skim.

See also: https://brutalist.report/

I am not a sports follower, but the site is very nice.

It is a very nice quick goto when some friends start talking sports and I can pretend I care :)

My favorite sites are:

https://lite.cnn.com/

https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html

https://text.npr.org/

Plus gopher and gemini :)

Thanks

Also:

gopher://magical.fish

gopher://sdf.org

Do I get street cred for having a site that can also be read via the FINGER protocol? (-:

> this is their real website and not something they've just kept for historical purposes or something. https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

Seeing "<font size=..." makes me wince a bit, but it sure is refreshing to see something like this in the current year. (Also, is the Geico ad hard-coded?)

They own Geico.

> I would pay good money to watch a clear-glasses-framed youngster pitch Buffet on turning the BH website into a progressive web app.

How about pitching an hour of work to make it easy to read on mobile? Not that I think BH cares, but in this day and age making it layout nicely on mobile is the least you can do and isn’t particularly difficult anymore.

Mr. Buffett seems like the kind of guy that makes you shut your phone off during a meeting. When you're conducting 'serious business' in your Brooks Brothers suit and silk tie at the oaken table you'll have a real computer open anyway.

The "message from Warren Buffet" feels a bit slimey.

They already have ads on their landing page for the same thing. That extra message comes across like a used car salesman. He could have phrased it to be informative but in a somewhat more impartial writing style.

Are you really that bothered by a text-only sales pitch (which has an old-timey "I sell vacuum cleaners door to door" charm to it), or would you have preferred a full page interstitial demanding you disable your ad blocker, with a size 1pt font "I'll do it next time"?

The only thing funnier than this complaint is the thread on Quora criticizing this site, with the top post specifically demeaning the site's lack of a "back-end", postulating that manually updating half a dozen text-only HTML pages in MS Word poses an unreasonable burden to the site operators.

I assume a CMS, complicated database, and mountains of JavaScript would have been a more effective choice. But what do I know? Plain HTML isn't subject to the revolving door of application vulnerabilities so where is the fun in that?

I mean, it's definitely a sales pitch, but it its a rational one. The GEICO one for example:

>I estimate that about 40% of all auto drivers in the country can save money by insuring with GEICO. The figure is not 100% because insurers differ in their underwriting judgments, with some favoring drivers who live in certain geographical areas and work in certain occupations more than GEICO does. I believe, however, that GEICO more frequently offers the low price than does any other national carrier selling insurance to all comers. You can quickly find out whether you can save money by going to www.geico.com or by calling 800-555-2756.

And it is the Berkshire Hathaway website. Pitching their services seems like something you would expect.

Yes I don’t expect to see the BH site in particular be mobile friendly, but there’s lots of text only sites that are terrible to read on mobile. By “mobile-friendly” I just mean set the viewport width to something reasonable relative to the font size.

Most of these sites predate viewport tags.

http://stallman.org/ is another one. Though that's more likely because your mobile device is full of non-free badware or something so why encourage it.

Yeah text is definitely too small on most of the pages for mobile

> How about pitching an hour of work to make it easy to read on mobile? Not that I think BH cares, but in this day and age making it layout nicely on mobile is the least you can do and isn’t particularly difficult anymore.

I think it looks great on mobile. It's fast as shit and I'm still just a 2 clicks away from an annual report. Frankly I often prefer the desktop layout even on mobile.

More examples at:

* https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/

* https://onepagelove.com/tag/text-only

Plus https://briefingday.com

Looks like this is your site - thank you for sharing. I like it. Brief and seems really neutral. Of course there is no such thing as no bias (eg always have to pick headlines to show at a minimum) but I think you do a good job.

Any details on how it works anywhere?

Also noticed this site from your personal site: https://biztoc.com/

I love the information density. By no means a text only site but I think it hits some of the same vibes.

EDIT: lite mode of biztoc in-line with the text only theme: https://biztoc.com/light

RSS would be epic for that!

https://news.ycombinator.com/

The NPR website was amazingly slow to load to be text only

Depending on your definition of "amazingly", it was probably just a transient quirk.

I load text.npr.org (and lite.cnn.com) several times a day. They both load in times well below the realm of remarkable.

Just timed them:

  - text.npr.org 89/96/109 ms
  - lite.cnn.com 56/72/133 ms

I agree that a text-focused web experience is important. The modern web makes it too easy to add trackers, consent banners, ads, and other distractions that pull attention away from the content.

There’s actually a network protocol separate from the web with a small but growing user base. It uses a Markdown inspired format called Gemtext, has no cookies or trackers, and avoids most of the usual bloat seen in 2025. It’s called the Gemini protocol. It’s not perfect from the perspective of protocol design (which some people on HN can’t seem to get over), but it works, it has real users, and you can try it today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

What the hell. Amazing to learn that people actually try to get things like this off the ground. I can remember many years ago having the kernel of a similar idea. Except I also imagined using JSON to describe page layout, like a common "UI form designer" language. On the other hand, this gets much further into the transport protocol, as opposed to just page content.

It has come up on Hacker News fairly regularly over the past few years. Some examples:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44631577

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44645144

While I do agree — using at least a non-monospaced font would be a choice that's nicer to the reader.

Ideally websites wouldn’t specify a font at all, other than cases where that’s a necessary part of the design.

The capability is nice to have—for example, if your website is a coding tutorial website, and you have interspersed code examples and prose, put the code examples in a fixed width font. But it is over-used. For example, why do sites pick serif vs non-serif? Leave it up to my browser.

This is why I almost always send emails as plain text. I want people to be able to read their emails in any font they would like, not necessarily the font I used when I wrote the email.

This isn’t just superficial, some people might use certain fonts that are easier to read for dyslexia, and I don’t think I should make their life artificially harder if it’s trivial for me to simply send a message as plain text.

The problem with that is that we've already lost this fight and now "plain text email" means "the recipient will see it in 11pt Courier New".

As for accessibility, the people who need that have already set up the required font overrides and other stuff so it doesn't really benefit them much to use plaintext.

It's sad to think about how things could have been, but that's not the world we live in now...

I am ok with them reading it as 11pt Courier New. To me the whole point of sending messages as plain text is that it doesn’t really matter to me how they read it. If they want to be lazy and read it with the default that’s fine by me, at least I gave them an option.

Also I like using text because it shows I’m not hiding any kind of tracking images or anything like that.

On the other hand, fonts can be an expression of your personality. Shouldn't it be preferable to centrally enable overriding fonts instead of forcing every site designer not to use custom fonts to express themselves? Theoretically, it is easier to remove formatting than it is to add it. Therefore, this functionality should be part of the browser, not the website. Firefox has this as an option: "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above".

Personally, I quite like the site's design and its font. My gripe often is light gray text on a darker gray background. The bad readability that so many newer sites seem to prefer makes me question my eyes or my monitor capabilities. Reader mode in Firefox is also often very helpful.

“Ideally” here is a statement of what I’d find ideal. I’m not nominating myself as font-police or suggesting that we force people to do anything.

But, the feature is overused, IMO. Anything can be used to express a bit of personality, but I do think it is sometimes specified in cases where it really isn’t.

Pros on cons I suppose. I liked the monospace font and I think it works well for some content, especially shorter form content.

IMO a nice serif font is ideal for long form content though. I remember reading the serifs help guide ones eyes into the next character and create more unique shapes than sans or monospace.

There has been some recent research on this sort of thing. It ends up being whatever you are used to. Everyone used to think serif was better for reading but then everyone started reading a lot of sans on computer screens. So now people think sans is somehow inherently better.

It's the same for mono vs proportional spacing. You are better at reading that which you have the most practice with. Most people are not used to reading monospaced prose even if they have seen a lot of monospaced code.

> Most people are not used to reading monospaced prose even if they have seen a lot of monospaced code.

I've noticed that too - I read code all day, but there's something very odd about having conversations (prose) with Claude Code via a terminal window.

Haha, I agree! This is my blog and I can definitely improve the readability.

I don't mind monospace too much, but definitely not the font chosen... the spacing is just awkward to say the least, my eyes just want to wander when trying to read... and I look at monospace fonts in a code editor all day. Fira Code or Inconsolata.

That said, I'd probably just stick to "sans-serif" and let the browser/os preference hold. It's likely a helvetica/arial alike anyway and can be set by user preference if really wanted.

Browser reading mode is an easy workaround.

It is, but it is also a bit annoying that we have a “render sensibly” button now. Why isn’t that the default?

It is (a bit annoying).

It depends, sometimes it doesn’t work on Safari, and Reader Mode still shows monospace. Might be <tt> vs. something else.

But the whole point of the site is to demonstrate how great text-only websites are.

There is something remarkably beautiful about minimal websites that use primarily text, perhaps with one or two images, and only styles that enhance readability. This is unbeatable UX. Whenever I encounter sites like these, I envision an alternative universe where the internet remained as it was in the beginning: no commercial strings attached, lightweight pages on affordable hosting, and easily accessible information so that search engines actually work. The internet was one of our greatest creations, but we’ve since ruined it with our greed...

Lwn.net comes to mind.

I've always wanted to create a blog "platform" that's just plaintext or markdown files in a git repo hosted over a torrent-like network. By publishing, you automatically sign every post (commit) with a key, the fingerprint which can be used for lookup on a DHT. By "following" a blog, you're just cloning the git repo from peers and hosting it like a torrent. Things like fonts and colors get sorted out by the user, but the client has some built in theming options. Just roll it all in a simple app so mom and dad could use it.

Free hosting, censorship resistance, minimal styling blah blah blah. What's not to like?

Sounds super fun for a weekend project tbh

Feel free to run with it if you want, I haven't coded in a very long time.

Color contrast is also important. Like actually putting a readable header on the page. ('^_^)

This gives me a silly idea for an "accessibility" mode, where absolutely everything on the page is invisible to sighted people, but clearly, and perfectly readable to screen readers etc.

I did some professional services work years ago, very early in my career for a public-sector client that wanted accessibility features given absolute care and attention.

It really gave me some perspective and I've tried to be conscious of it ever since; though I'm purely back-end nowadays so it doesn't apply as much.

Went through similar in the eLearning space as well as on some govt adjacent work. A surprising amount is just common sense when using a well flushed out component library.

What's fun is making an app that explicitly requires well sightedness (scanned documents), and meeting accessibility requirements for literally everything in the app beyond that.

Aside: I wouldn't mind seeing a library where you can give a text weight and text color, with the background color you want to use, but it returns the closest background color that will meet accessibility/contrast requirements.

Maybe you could use STT so that the only written text visible is that which was able to pass through the screen reader.

That could be a privacy thing. Just make the site text friendly.

Yikes, I think I just fixed it. I'd never looked at my site in dark mode before.

Images and video are great, but everything in moderation. An image here and there to illustrate or demonstrate, but it's probably a good idea to limit yourself before loading time becomes a problem on slower connections.

The real problem that I've noticed in most cases comes from excessive JS. If you don't use JS, then you can't do tracking banner, since you can't track, can't really do ads, and video autoplay via the video tag is already disabled in browsers, so you can't do that either. With no JS, it's functionally impossible to do most of the things the ad-pilled marketers want to do with a website that makes it so horrible for the rest of us.

JS can be used in moderation too, but it opens the door to temptation, and the road from there to slow load times even on good connections is awfully short it seems.

You can do progressive enhancement too. JS enabled? Use ajax, show the form in a modal… JS not working? Fallback the standard browser navigation.

> you don't use JS, then you can't do tracking banner, since you can't track

You can still track (though not as efficiently). E.g. cookies are an HTTP header, not something JS sets.

GDPR aka "do not track/collect unnecessary data without consent" still applies regardless of whether your site is text only or not.

I quite enjoy reading Chris Siebenmann's blog [https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/] which is very light on theming, as I really like the aesthetic. I have to say though, if all blogs were like this the Internet might seem a bit boring, so I chose to give my own blog some personality.

When I first built my current site, it was fully unstyled like Chris', but as I started making little tweaks, they snowballed into a proper design. I couldn't help but add more of my personality to it.

Part of the joy of having a personal website that nobody reads is that it can act as a playground, and the design is part of that.

What do you like about reading this? Its so hard to read for me on a 27 inch monitor in a full screen browser window, lol

This is how most of The Web was in the early days, with some of the clunkiness smoothed out.

Text-only is fine, but why do you need to make it look like a page of typewriter output?

It kind of undermines the argument, and instead insists that the site looking like just a page of text is the important aspect.

"The page is just made of text, so it's infinitely reproducible.

You can paste the whole thing into an email to a friend. You can put it in ChatGPT to ask questions.

Hell-you can post the whole thing on X and pretend you wrote it!

You can read it right there, or you can send it to Kindle, save it to Matter, or print it on real-life paper.

It's going to work everywhere because it's just text."

Many years ago before "Wikipedia over DNS" but after "42 ways to distribute DeCSS"^1, I served tiny webpages in DNS TXT RRs from tinydns and modified dnstxt to print a HTTP header above the HTML

Today DNS data is being served via HTTPS: an HTTP header followed by a DNS RR, which could be a TXT RR, which theoretically could contain HTML

1. https://decss.zoy.org/

Distributed as text

Grey text on white background :-(

Do you actually have trouble reading it?

#111111 is pretty close to black.

According to https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/, the contrast is 18.88:1 and easily passes all of the accessibility tests.

There's an #EEE text on #FFF at the bottom of the post.

There seems to be a bug in this blog's stylesheet where the headings are significantly lower contrast if the browser renders prefers-color-scheme as dark instead of light.

I had my browser/OS in light mode, so the contrast was excellent, but I tried dark mode just to see what would happen, and it was... not excellent.

Thank you! This is my site, and your comment helped me fix it.

And the title too.

The page has a @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) style that causes this, so those in light mode are unaffected.

Oh - I'm in light mode and all the text on the page is #111111 with a #ffffff background. Switched to dark mode and now I see what you're saying - indeed that's not great.

Yes, I found the main body perfectly readable, but the lighter grey on white could be a problem for some. I'd use something like #777 or darker here.

The title is also showing up as #EEE on #FFF for me, but the inspector view is showing a bunch of other "computed" colour values in the CSS.

I often have trouble with grey fonts. Thanks to dyslexia, the letters look all fuzzy.

This particular website isn't bad. If the grey were just a bit lighter, it would be.

One problem is that IPS panels only have a contrast ratio of 1:1000 at best, meaning that #000000 black is already gray.

I like them a whole lot! Maybe it's because I'm a screen reader user, but maybe it's because I really like the internet circa 2001. Anyone ever seen the Simpson transcripts page? It's a whole bunch of text!! Probably pretty close to text only, as it's in the native 1995 format. Accept for the search that no longer works. I've been able to use site: searches. http://simpson.walraven.org/

I read the whole thing in Lynx. That's a beautiful thing, too.

how? Lynx looks like a opinionated boilerplate for creating apps?

"Lynx is the text web browser": https://lynx.invisible-island.net/

Must be a generational thing :)

Get off my lawn, kid!

At some point we will have to get past the meta of blog posts about blog posts though.

Everyone tends to think that what's new to themselves is new to everyone else too. So that's why we see the same "discoveries" talked about over and over, and fashion trends recycling every 10 years or so.

When you are old enough you see this phenomenon everywhere. My reply here might even be an example of it!

> My reply here might even be an example of it!

I think it is, but I didn't realize it until you pointed it out ;)

Web design has gotten too complicated. I really enjoy a simple site that focuses on content and readability vs fancy frameworks. There are sites still online from the 90s that looks better than much of the stuff produced today. Plus keeping it basic means your site will work well and look good forever.

Remember all those nonsense Flash intros sites used to have? For whatever reason restaurants were the worst at this (probably because consultants building these sites impressed the owner with “fancy stuff”). They were horrible… like just show me your friggin menu and don’t make we watch a 30 second nonsense intro to your website.

The modern version of that are these horrible single page templates that everyone uses where you just keep scrolling and scrolling and the “menu” is just taking you to different parts of this scroll-o-rama nonsense. I’ll take basic with good content over fancy design all day long.

I would counter that. I would say (good) web design has gotten simpler in the 32 years I've been doing it. The last few years where the browsers all started to cooperate on standards has made life a lot easier. CSS has gotten smaller because of better selectors, and HTML is simpler and more readable thanks to more semantic tags.

The div soups you see on sites like Facebook are obviously another story :)

Couldn't agree more. I love text only pages/sites that have some style.

> Hosting text is so cheap

Hosting images is cheap too. GitHub will even do it for free!

I have tried using a GitHub repo to host photos that I displayed on a different website. IIRC it didn't work great. I would try to access the photos over the raw GitHub URLs and I'm pretty sure they would often 404. Was I holding it wrong? Are there any great guides on this topic? I also remember that "uploading" photos over Git was a pain. Basically could only upload one at a time.

I meant using GitHub to host your whole site through gh-pages, not hotlinking to assets from some other unrelated server. You can even use your own domain.

I think they meant using github to host the page (with photos), not using github as a host for photos (iirc it isn't possible)

Hotlinking tends to be rough because people abuse github for free hosting. If the images are linked in a github page it usualkly works fine.

I just paste a screenshot into a GitHub issue and use the link it gives me.

In The Netherlands, Teletekst is still used a lot, a remnant from the 80s that miraculously survived into the internet era. It's one of the most installed apps here.

https://nos.nl/teletekst

You can even consume it over SSH: "ssh teletekst.nl"

I have dreams of building a web browser that operates only in this mode. No JS, just HTML, just user-selected CSS themes. It would be incompatible with most of the modern web, but it would be a window to the kind of web I want (back). Just need to find the time.

I used to have a Firefox profile set up that way. It was great for the sites that worked. Unfortunately, many sites didn't work well at all that way.

It sounds like the Lynx browser: https://lynx.browser.org/

Sorta, but what I have in mind is a graphical browser, not exactly like the OP. It would have CSS support under the user's control, not the website's control. Navigation would also be more constrained and predictable than the totally open-ended nature it has today. That would enable things like perfect universal dark mode, and excellent accessibility. Fuzzy navigation is on my wishlist too, based on a predictable nav structure.

You should try exploring what the Gemini protocol has to offer.

I would download that!

Name checks out! I hope to find the time to at least write up a blog post about how I imagine the browser would work.

The author seems to be conflating text-only with no-javascript. It's perfectly possible to make text-only webpages that exhibit all of the cancer and inconvenience of the modern web. In fact, most cookie consent popups are text-only.

Cookies themselves don't even need JavaScript.

I find it amusing that many text-only webpages emphasize it with a typewriter font.

I find author's position to be very confusing.

From https://albanbrooke.com/

> But over the past ~30 years, the internet has become much more commercial. Every page is optimized for engagement, so your attention can be resold to ad companies. It just kinda sucks.

later in the same page

> I'm the Head of Marketing for Buzzsprout, a podcast SaaS built on RSS.

And https://www.buzzsprout.com/ads is exactly what you'd expect. The author has no trouble working and getting paid for the same thing they lament.

Fwiw, I work in an industry I've come to abhor (computer vision for security, often euphemised to "smart cities"). I hold my nose and wear my golden handcuffs reluctantly, and "technology transfer" FOSS into garbage products for incompetent middle managers by day, then talk shit about them at night to feel better.

Perhaps the author is in a similar situation?

All of us are "living in the glass house" [1]. If you're taking a strong position, I expect people to be a) self-aware b) state their biases/hypocricy upfront.

It is the holier than thou ("Look how bad things are. tsk tsk") that I cant stand.

The message would have been much better if was like "We live in this economy, and wouldnt it be nice if we could .. oh and by the way, I am part of the problem and here's what I'm doing about it."

The article is no different than a drug dealer saying "the drug problem in this country is out of control.

[1]: People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones

FWIW, we don't do any tracking with Buzzsprout Ads. We can tell you which podcasts accepted the ads, how many plays the episodes received, but we don't track the end user at all.

Again, not knocking on the business plan, but how you square that with your stated position?

> But over the past ~30 years, the internet has become much more commercial.

You work for a company doing podcasts, distributed over internet, which lets creators make money. It is the definition of commercial.

> Every page is optimized for engagement, so your attention can be resold to ad companies.

You can rewrite that "page" with "content", and then how different is your podcast? "Every content (podcast) is optimized for engagement, so your attention can be resold to ad companies".

> We can tell you which podcasts accepted the ads

How do you know which podcasts accepted ads? Yes, by tracking. To be honest, it isnt a bad word at all - but you made it to be a bad word, and I'm pointing that out.

EDIT: Your company uses GTM, which I'm sure you look at as the Head of Marketing.

I suspect they use this for two things:

1. Monospace which helps with formatting

2. Availability: I don’t think there are a whole lot of built-in monospace fonts

You don't need monospace for formatting.

And there are a few options for system fonts: https://iainbean.com/posts/2021/system-fonts-dont-have-to-be...

Boom, you got yourself a text-mostly website with no monospace: https://dmitriid.com/hypermedia-is-a-property-of-the-client (with an option for images of course https://dmitriid.com/romania-2023)

You're preaching to the choir my friend. But websites suck for the reasons you described not because people like sucky websites but because they like profiting of the site. For this reason I am very interested to see where Cloudflare takes the new market they are establishing with "pay per crawl". I would love the ability to load up a balance of several dollars and pay a few cents transparently on the HTTP protocol when visiting a website if it means no ads, supporting the creator, and incentivizing clean reading experience.

Maybe I see too many 16pt font powerpoints but I like images. Images don't require a cdn or cookie banner or javascript, there is ample daylight between text only and heavyweight.

Bug-free text can indeed be nice to look at.

Speaking of bugs: the Unicode-art at the bottom of the mentioned page isn't showing correctly.

No single web font can display all Unicode code-points, and using a suitable font for that Unicode-art would fix it.

More on that here:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/...

Agreed. 99% of the websites out there today are so loaded with images and videos that they would've taken 25 minutes to open on dial up.

I currently use Hugo with a fairly lightweight theme for my blog, which I like ok, but my stuff is primarily text and I’ve debated trying to find something even lighter.

The issue is that I do use pictures occasionally in my posts, and these aren’t just flavor, it’ll be graphs and screenshots and stuff. I also do use Javascript purely for the client-side search [1] and going hyper-minimal kind of means a rejection of JavaScript. Search isn’t strictly “necessary” but kind of nice.

And that’s the recurring theme I keep finding; 99% of stuff can easily be converted to a dumb and fast text-only thing, but then there’s that one thing that makes me keep stuff bloated.

[1] https://blog.tombert.com/posts/2025-03-12-search-v2/

Picture can be ok with an alt text and proper link (not the background-image property) and you can always support ssr for the search page.

For sure. Pictures certainly have their place on the web. I was speaking more about websites where the entire design is made of images, even when it doesn’t make any sense to do so.

Oh I definitely don’t do that; images that I have on there are actual content, not decoration.

The template I have still uses CSS but it’s not a ton of CSS. Probably the most problematic thing I do with it is load a custom TTF font.

Sorry, having a bit of trouble with searching…what is SSR?

Server side rendering (templates and sending HTML down the wire) when compared to client side rendering (Receiving json from an API). Mostly used in the JS world as PHP/Django/Rails use SSR by default..

But then I have to have a server to serve the data. The entire appeal of something like Hugo is that it is static and can be trivially served with nginx or something.

If I do it client-side then that makes my job a fair bit easier; I don’t need to handle any kind of complicated server logic, I don’t need to mess around with databases, I really don’t need to program at all, and if I am going to manage a blog I fundamentally want it to be about writing. Otherwise all my time goes to fucking around with configurations or figuring out why a database has crashed.

Also I hate Django and Rails and PHP and absolutely will not touch any of them unless someone is paying me. I know there are other options out there though.

It doesn't have to be text only. An html only webpage has all the same benefits. The real issue everyone has a problem with is javascript applications. The images and even multi-media in a static webpage made of html on HTTP/1.1 are not really the problem. Geocities sites had plenty of images and they were just as accessible as a 'text only' page/

I think there is space for images, but they should be carefully considered. They should add to the overall text.

I provide additional features for users, one is TTS so that they can listen to the article. Another feature is a little icon that appears for links that are external to the website.

I have recently come around to the idea of adding a banner image, as a way of tone setting for the text to come.

It sounds like you are adding things with care and thought, but is there a reason the user might care that the link is to an external site?

Because the trust associated with my site and domain doesn't necessarily extend to another. The user should know that they are navigating away from the trust I have earned with them.

> Another feature is a little icon that appears for links that are external to the website.

Could you expand further on why you propose this?

As I said in the other comment [1], I can't extend the trust associated with my site to other sites not under my control.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44926470

Thank you for sharing this, post 50 I find myself enjoying minimalism and text heavy content, and minimize my consumption of jangling distractions.

Scrolling down to the bottom of your page I clicked through to https://bearblog.dev/ and explored some of the pages there.

Bummer you can't host it yourself

But you can. There are bearblog lookalike SSG themes. For example: https://janraasch.github.io/hugo-bearblog/

I think the beauty comes from the simplicity and focus. Many websites with a lot of things going on can also be beautiful because they're so focused.

See Single Serving Sites as an example: https://singleservingsites.cool/

I get every webpage as text-only

I can reformat webpages into formatted text exactly the way I want it; I can save the important bits into an SQL database (I like the text-only output of sqlite3)

I do not use a popular, so-called "modern" browser; no graphics, no automatic sourcing of resources (files), no css, no javascript

I cannot understand why HN commenters believe that text-only is up to the web developer (whereupon the web user must look for aesthetcially-pleasing websites)

Text-only is up to the web user; all webpages look more or less the same to me; it's just text

Why use a graphical browser to view text

If you can come up with reasons, then either (a) you are a web developer or (b) you will be a target for online ads, whether you like them or not^1

1. And you will spend a gross amount of time and energy trying to "block" them

Please don't misunderstand me; sometimes one needs graphics, fonts, etc.^2; but that decision is up to the web user, not the web developer

tl;dr the decision to consume information published on the web as text-only is up to the web user, not the web developer

1. Such occasions might call for using a so-called "modern" browser, with graphics, Javascript and so on. For example, making airline reservations using a website. However, this does not preclude one from consuming website information as text-only, e.g., in the process of searching for fares. This decision is for the web user, not the web developer. Different web users may make different decisions.

I wish I could live like this, but I don't use the internet just for pleasure. There are things like buying flights, buying concert tickets, anything with a bank, etc. that require exactly the setup that the web developer had, lest the site explode.

It's also very difficult to delegate since they'll want some cybersecurity theatre "verifciation" that requires multiple devices, cursed mobile apps, and "selfies".

I don't see any way around this apart from not taking flights, or paying a lot more for these privileges.

"I don't see any way around this apart from not taking flights, or paying a lot more for these privileges"

But someone else might see ways around it; not every www user is the same

For example, it's possible to use a popular browser for banking and purchasing tickets while using some other program(s) for reading and commenting on HN

If one only ever uses the internet for banking and purchasing tickets, and refrains from any noncommercial use, e.g., reading HN submissions and commenting on them, then a popular web browser might be all one ever needs

But how many websites submitted to HN require "cybersecurity theatre "verification" that requires multiple devices, cursed mobile apps, and "selfies""

Other www users might only spend a relatively small amount of their internet usage making purchases

Not every www user is the same, nor is every website on the internet the same

"... lest the site explode."

I use a setup that differs from web developers and I have never seen a website "explode"; this includes commercial websites

Like the OP suggests, it's just text

Which browser do you use? W3m? Elinks?

I'd like to know what post above yours is using as well. I'm posting this from the venerable links in a terminal. HN works OK on a text mode browser, including find in page. This level of functionality isn't the rule though.

"HN works OK on a text mode browser, including find in page."

Perhaps that's one reason why I spend so much time on HN

"95% of the time", I am a text-mode command line user, no graphics layer (note difference between "text-mode" and "terminal"; I'm not using the later)

I make choices in software based on what I think works well for command line use and what fits own aesthetic preferences

TBH I have no idea what are other peoples' preferred aesthetics, I only know mine

Currently,

I submit/reply/edit on HN using tiny shell scripts, no browser (TCP client to send the HTTP, custom text-processing filter to format the request body)

I search HN using a local SQLite database and a shell one-liner

I read HN using links (modified with some personal changes)

In the past I have stated that I use links as an "HTML reader"; I do not necessarily use links to make HTTP requests nor do I necessarily consume all webpage content as HTML; mostly I am using links to read HTML offline, e.g., an HTML file saved to a tmpfs directory

The point I'm trying to make when I mention I'm not using a popular browser is that, according to the design of the www, www users (e.g., me) get to choose the software, not web developers or website operators

As such, I would not expect any other www users to necessarily use the same software; nor would I expect any www user to care about any other www user's personal preferences, particularly mine; others could have different expectations

Each www user can choose whatever software they want, including software that isn't popular

When I mention I'm not using a popular browser, I sometimes get these "what browser are you using" comments

I'm not inclined to answer because I think it distracts from the point I am trying to make; it's a tangent, a red herring

I wish the question was something like "how do you view [example.com]", where example.com is some website the commenter visits that causes them to believe popular web browsers are required for _every_ website

Chances are, I do not visit the same website; every www user is different

But if I knew what this website was, then perhaps I could demonstrate how I might extract the information I wanted from it and read it as a text file

Thank you for taking the time to write this detailed description of your methodology for reading and interacting with Web sites. I found it interesting and I'm going to look a little more closely at what actually happens when I type a Web address into a browser address bar!

I don't spend that much time on HN hence the delay in replying.

> "I'm not inclined to answer because I think it distracts from the point I am trying to make; it's a tangent, a red herring"

I sort of guessed that you were not using a 'standard' Web browser (tui or gui) which is why I became interested. At least you now have a text that you can post a link to next time someone becomes insistent about this.

"At least you now have a text that you can post a link to next time someone becomes insistent about this."

Exactly right, that's the idea

HN commenters sometimes ask for "a writeup"

I think it's interesting that you use links and consider it venerable

There are some great websites listed here, and some of them do have some CSS. How much CSS is too much for a website to be praised as being text only?

  Oh man.  This kind of blew up.

  Here are my links, since we seem to be sharing our favourite
  "small web" resources.

  1. NO-HTML (text only) club.
     https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43193383

     I admire the aesthetic, but I'm too addicted to links to
     say "no html."   Though yeah, I guess you can't have a
     BLINK tag if you can't have HTML.

  2. org-social, like tweets over RSS, but inside emacs
     https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44889354

     I use emacs.  I like lisp.  I'm one of //those// weirdos.
     This is sort of like sending tweets into the void via
     RSS, but in org-mode syntax so you never have to leave
     emacs.

  3. 1kb club - a site for pages that are less than 1kb
     https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35463629

     Seems more like an excuse to put a bunch of ASCII art on
     a page, but sure... good art sometimes comes from
     embracing limitations.  But then again, sometimes that
     makes bad art.  YMMV.

  4. "Bobcat" -- a list of useful, small web pages
     HTTPS://BI6.US/CO/BO.HTML

     This is my small web page where I point to other small
     web pages, but I try to send it with a "does this look
     useful to a general audience" filter.

  5. The Bit-Roast Nano-Blog
     HTTPS://BI6.US/CO/N/

     I called this a "nano-blog" not because each post was
     very small, but because I implemented it with not very much
     javascript (running on a dev machine to produce static
     content.)

  Hmm.  I think the OP's page and the comments and up-votes
  indicates there's a community of people who are hip to simple
  sites that aren't overloaded with //stuff//.  I don't know if
  there's a market for web pages that fit on a single phone
  screen and be mostly text, but it would be fun.  (Oh wait...
  did I just describe WAP/WML?)

  /etc /etc

Will follow up with the beauty of readable fonts on text only webpages. I found this font of the blog hard to read.

Ooo, I have a fun one!

https://hawkins.tech/

Presumably you mean because with 19/20 of it being JavaScript that maxes out multiple processors to continually redraw graphics with only three words of text on the opening screen, it is the complete antithesis of what the headlined article talks about. (-:

Guilty on the splash. Regardless the entire site is clean text, fast loads, no images, and no blockers.

In the author's own words:

> “So thank you to everybody who writes and publishes text-only webpages.”

I hope this was sarcasm. That website is the exact opposite.

I wasn't. I indeed find the site to be fun, and fits the author's own words.

> “So thank you to everybody who writes and publishes text-only webpages.”

The site is 100% text.

The symbols at the bottom of the page don't render correctly.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Kinda slow when switching sections.

I just knew before going there it was going to be in a monospace font.

All of my websites have zero JavaScript or cookies, loads on a blink.

Wellll... Almost text only, except for the little SVG heart...

I wish there were some cool text—only Wordpress themes.

How about making a complete website using only CSS1?

Agreed. And by the way, I really love the simplicity of https://wordgag.com/ (even though it has some ads on it).

That popup at the bottom is gross, and there's a whole screen worth of ads to scroll by as soon as you get rid of it.

I'm sorry but your page is a prime example of web enshittification. It's the kind of site I immediately move on from.

Nonsense. People gotta make money, especially with AI eating the web.

bearblog has gotten way more usage than i ever would have expected

Bear blog got traction, IMHO, by being light and allowing tons of customization. The default state is very bare, I have seen people went berserk with it.

My platform of choice is Mataroa (https://mataroa.blog), and I love their simpler approach.

If you want to go even more minimal, there's https://smol.pub and https://prose.sh.

> The default state is very bare

Missed pun opportunity

I was too tired to bear any bears at that hour of the night. Plus bears see better at night than me, so staying away from that bear was apt for my safety.

So, instead of bearing possible bear induced pain, I slept soundly after a pint of beer.

Plus, I'm still in one piece, so at least I can consider this a win.

I like text-only web pages, but please don’t use a monospace typeface.

Different typefaces have different functions. If the goal is to be able to properly align/indent/space complex texts on a text-only site, a proportional font is not only ugly but actually unusable.

Any typesetting system or a good text editor will happily indent and align proportional fonts. Browsers can indent, but cannot quite align; they lack tab stops and tables are not quite a good substitute.

But it has to be separate from writing. I'd say the benefit of monospace fonts is that it is easier and faster to type and more or less typeset at the same time.

I don’t think the article means to prohibit CSS (or tables) for layout. It is using text markup, and has a footer with CSS padding as well. Proportional fonts are perfectly compatible with aligning and indenting. Look at Craigslist for example.

I like these two:

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

The fact that I cannot "unlike" the post at the bottom of the page is mildly infuriating.

> They're a refuge from the GDPR cookie banners

When I get presented with one of these I often just click out of the website.

If you're looking to spread information, make it easy by just delivering it to me unobstructed. Your GDPR bullshit doesn't apply to me anyway, I'm not in the EU.

Good luck rendering latex.

yes yes yes

slop

I prefer images.

Text is fed into my brain and then my brain needs to generate the image related to the text so in the end it’s all images anyway.

A text based webpage just causes me to do more work and even then the image in my mind could be wildly inaccurate.

What images would you have preferred the author use in this blog post?

A picture of a text only post, obviously.

Like a youtube video where he narrates his whole idea with different cuts of his ideas in action.

Videos that contrast as he narrating the beauty of text based pages with examples of the contrary and a panning camera.

For this:

>You can paste the whole thing into an email to a friend. You can put it in ChatGPT to ask questions.

>Hell—you can post the whole thing on X and pretend you wrote it!

I'd like to see flashcuts of a person in front of the computer actually doing it while he narrates it. With cool music.

That style. Because this is what my brain is producing in my head if he doesn't.

A significant issue with videos is that it's harder/impossible to skim them. Also, they don't allow for (accurate) quick search.

I'm optimistic we'll soon see some AI startup provide proper solutions to these issues. But until then I prefer text.

Videos are good for passive consumption but terrible for active consumption. I can't skim or linger or jump back and forth at a glance.

Besides, flash-cuts of people acting out narration with music offer me nothing. A video like that is functionally just audio—a great candidate for playing in the background, in another tab, while I do something else.

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