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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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

Also https://text.npr.org/

http://68k.news/

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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