A small collection of text-only websites | Hacker News Reader

A small collection of text-only websites

shkspr.mobi

153 pointsdanielfalbo60 comments

Honorable mention: https://text.npr.org/

Not technically plaintext (in the MIME type sense), but still very lightweight, especially when compared to other news sites.

Also:

https://lite.cnn.com/

I read these two all the time. I wish nytimes.com came in a text version, I hate the move to video. I was raised on newspapers not mtv...

The NYT api is really flexible. I made my own NYT ascii frontpage site. It works off the headlines - which is enough for much of my browsing. Then I can jump to the full article, or a scrape.

As a long time subscriber the move to video has been pretty painful. In general the flow of stories has changed so much that I miss more news than I see in the NYT.

Also:

https://www.cbc.ca/lite

Offering a plain text version of your website may seem like a novel idea nowadays but I remember a time when pretty much every web page had a printer-friendly version with little to no formatting. I suppose printing web pages has become passé, that is unless you're printing a food recipe.

Thanks for putting together this list, it would be nice to add a short summary next to each link.

I recall on the morning of September 11, 2001, CNN had to completely redesign their site into a text-only version (no images or videos) just to keep up with the strain. Slashdot.org was the only site I went to that was able to keep functioning as-is.

https://lite.cnn.com/

I use this all the time. I wish every media outlet had the same.

Reason is a bit different - print version was built in adblocker so they got rid of it…

I have to wonder if printing has gone down in popularity, in part, because so many websites handle it so poorly these days. I will sometimes "print" to PDF to save an article I want to read or reference, so I don't have to worry about the site disappearing on me. The quality of these PDFs has dropped dramatically over the years. With some sites it's almost not even worth it.

On several of my previous projects I've been tasked with making the print broken, not just "disabled", to try and force people into the "happy path" where there's a download button. Despite the beforeprint event that would let me trigger the same process.

(I've argued and lost that fight, more often than won it.)

In these fights, did they give the justification for the download button? I'm continuously frustrated by these types of things that go out of their way to break native functionality. Is there a way where they can get extra information and tracking on the user; is that the goal?

To me the "happy path" is the one the user would naturally take, without needing to learn the quirks of each site.

Well, not to entirely leak what I do but the justification is... Salesforce. [0] Omni-anything is a painful, overcomplicated, JS and DB intense process. Generating some PDFs can take in excess of thirty seconds, just because it hits five different objects. And can only be triggered by JS.

[0] https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=ind.sf_contract...

I like the spirit of text-only but Markdown is similar enough and gives clickable links, embeddable static images etc. Its the JS, CSS, video, audio and surveillance shenanigans which have gotten out of hand and become noisey (and nosey.)

I've been considering implementing a feature like this in my blog, but in a slightly more HTTP-ish way. Something like, if the Accept header leads with text/markdown, reply with markdown.

This feels more "pure" to me, but it also means that you couldn't actually use it from a typical web browser. So it'd be utterly pointless, but then again, so is my blog.

sounds like a net win. Markdown is a superset of plain text anyway. You could make Markdown the "source" format for each page and then the web server decides at last second which MIME type header to return based on requested suffix. But even if they request .txt the page body could be identical to the md

I have a few WIP books where Markdown is my source format for similar reasons. I then use pandoc to render to txt, html, pdf, doc or epub as desired.

In some web apps I code, I just serialize the view-model when the page is called with a ".json" or ".yaml" at the end. It forces you to be strict about not leaking private/complex data into the views and makes power-users' life much easier.

".txt" is also a good idea for content-heavy pages. Maybe ".md" too? I may try.

If you append ".txt" to any memo (post) or remark URL on my blog[1], you'll see a text-only version, formatted like an RFC.

This redesign is only a few weeks old. Previously, only the homepage of my blog was HTML/CSS, the posts were all text files by default. Most (all?) people were frustrated with the mobile experience but I loved it. I only redesigned because I wanted to see images on my blog again. You can see the previous version in the 2025 branch[2] of my repo.

---

[1]: https://blog.webb.page

[2]: https://github.com/NetOpWibby/blog/tree/2025

I need to enable JavaScript to "proof I am human" just to get a txt file from this site.

Anyway, i'd like to mention the no HTML club: https://no-html.club/index.txt

Also self plug: https://txt.basilikum.monster You can also get the text version from basilkum.monster directly by sending the appropriate accept header.

I didn't know about the .text extension for Daring Fireball: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/31/photoshop-1-and...

Interesting to see how the original creator of Markdown uses it.

I'm presuming that's the version he edits and not output automatically converted from an intermediary representation.

Daring Fireball had the ‘.text’ version since at least the public release of Markdown, if not earlier.

This should be the version Gruber edits in MarsEdit or BBEdit, but it maybe partly rendered by the Moveable Type CMS

The extension is ‘.text’ because that is what he suggested as the Markdown extension, but of course most of us went with ‘.md’

While keyword tags are not used on the website, you can see the one he uses for his personal purposes at the bottom of the Markdown

> Obviously a webpage without links is like a fish without a bicycle,

URLs are text. Anchor tags are text. The "link" part is a function of the content viewer. text/plain just happens to not trigger that function in most browsers, but there's no guarantee it won't. If I paste that plain text into an email, it's likely my client or the the receiver's is going to "linkify" it.

"Terence Eden's blog - add .txt to any URl."

For my textsites, I use the whole address, e.g., http://ynac.freeshell.org/Yuengling.txt and will often repeat the instruction to right-click on any link to follow. That way, navigation is strong and layout just that much more challenging.

Why is this page so horrible?

It's clearly intentional, but I just can't think of a reason to intentionally make your website this unusable?

Have you tried a different theme? Perhaps you're accidentally on "nude" when you would be happier with "drunk". Or vice versa, no accounting for taste.

Oh there are themes!

Mine defaulted to drunk for some reason and it's so horrible I didn't even realise I could change it!

OP here - sorry you got the drunk theme. That shouldn't happen by default. Had you visited my site before? Are you using an esoteric browser I might not have tested?

I don't recall visiting your site before, but that's not really indicative of anything(I've learned but to trust my memory).

Chrome in android

What column width - don't tell me these plain text gurus use one long line per paragraph? Are Unicode emojis valid? What about a TUI using Unicode box drawing? Or ASCII characters? 7-bit ASCII only for the entire blog? Is there a way to handle input (a telnet connection?)?

We've hardly scratched the surface here.

(Now I want to make a TUI site.)

Also there is gemini (real, not google's stolen name thing) and gopher. Gemini renders great on Cell Phones.

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

> real, not google's stolen name thing

I never knew Google invented the Zodiac.

Interesting. I've implemented naked CSS on my blog, which isn't quite the same:

https://theandrewbailey.com/x-naked

I really enjoy using text.npr.org from my Kindle / Kindle Scribe. I'm really thinking about setting up a self-hosted RSS aggregator site that's Kindle-friendly.

berkshirehathaway.com is a great text-only site, containing troves of buffett's letters with much wisdom. though the actual text mostly end up in pdf formats.

It looks like they played with the design a little between 1997 and 2002 (even getting a little wild with an animated gif in 1999 during the dotcom era). Once they got it dialed in, they stuck with it. This is the mark of a company that knows what business it's in and where to focus.

https://web.archive.org/web/20020329105739/http://berkshireh...

I think this site/list is more fitting: https://textonly.website/

Almost none of the sites in that list are actually text. They’re just minimally styled html/css.

This entirely depends on your perspective/interpretation of “text-only”.

To me, having only text as the output with no ads, videos, or images is “text-only”. It doesn’t matter how it’s presented as long as it’s just text.

But I also see your perspective. You want plain defaults with white background color, black foreground color, and no formatting.

This thread is about text the MIME type. It’s not a subjective definition.

> The rules are simple - content which has the MIME type of text/plain. No HTML, no multimedia, no RTF, no XML, no ANSI colour escape sequences.

Your definition is fine for you, but it’s not what TFA is about.

I feel like the article should've been called "plaintext-only websites" or something, because if you had asked me I would've also defined "text-only" as image/video-less websites

I struggle with the purity of meaning for text-only as well. Before this thread, I didn't understand the mime settings; I've been living a lie with a browser friendly landing page that uses:

<!DOCTYPE HTML><plaintext>

And then all the other pages of the site to be pure *.txt files. In the end, until there are standards to point to, I just accept minimalism as the scale. I have ads, layouts, boxes / frames, and all sorts of possibly annoying aspects to my textsites. It is a medium that's just as easily abused as any!

"No arbitrary code execution" is how I'd put it. "Ads" can be plain text, they just usually aren't on the internet. If a plain text site decided to include them once in a while, I'd celebrate the choice.

It’s more so that “text” in this case refers to “text (.txt) file” rather than “letters and numbers”

Fun to think of it but I think my website actually got removed from that list because it has a logo on top of each page. It is available as “text only” (although not text/plain but text/markdown) by substituting the .xhtml with .md in the URL unlike some other pages on the textonly.website list, though :)

https://brutalist.report

How cool transition on history back!

Glad you like it :-)

Several years ago, I transitioned my Wordpress website to a static CSS/HTML only site, editing/updating it with vim and sftp https://chuck.is. Overall, it's been a fantastic learning experience doing everything manually (though I plan to automate more soon). I was inspired by http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

they should atleast make it super large font and full screen for my extra large 32 inch screen, i am literally look at the left hand edge of the window to read their articles

They're literally serving the content with a text/plain media type.

If your browser is rendering plaintext documents in a way that's unreadable, that's a failure of your web browser to serve as an effective user agent for your needs.

(People shoot down the analogous argument for changing the base formatting of text/html, because changing the base UA styles would throw brittle old stylesheets out of whack. But plaintext doesn't have stylesheets that could be thrown out-of-whack.)

might as well add https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ to the list

That's HTML. Not text.

Can't get behind the design / UX of this site

On mobile, it's extremely hard to read, though.

I’m pondering on this functionality for static site builders that already say have some sort of Markdown to HTML Page pipeline.

For most SSG (Static site generators) I’ve seen that take a plain text to html conversion, they usually only serve up .html

Wondering out loud if this would be a useful and desirable addition for SSG tools to have the option to serve up say .html and a .md (or .txt or whatever).

Am I missing something? Be a good idea/feature yeah?

I do it and it works.

The only thing you might be missing: I don't think it helps many people really.

I personally still like the feature because I put my website under a free software license and then it is only fitting that you could view the actual source code. Having the `.md` next to the `.xhtml` available helps to achieve this.

Very interesting

Is it just me but the links are missing in the text only page?

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