During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
sparkbox.com
sparkbox.com
More listed at https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites
It’d be great if there was some standard that allowed these to be easily found, and supported on the local news sites.
IMO, we need a RSS optimized browser that would also block Javascript before user interaction (or even more).
If someone makes a new tech that makes that impossible, 10 principled FSF-enjoyers will write content for it and nobody else. Web standard bloat is bad, but it didn’t cause this problem, and you can’t fix it by creating a new spec.
RSS is a good point that I didn’t consider. Although it tends to be a summary and hyperlink to the main site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol
WML pages had mostly text and hyperlinks from what I remember and even though it supported images too I think most such basic pages would be readable even if you turned image loading off.
I had some sort of Nokia running on whatever 2kbps networking was going then, and would shave absolutely anything I could to make the forums load slightly faster.
This often makes a really nice API if you can do other formats too - the main page of cnn could respond to rss accept headers and give me a feed for example.
Even when it isn't broken the display output is broken in Thunderbird because the dev isn't going to bother checking Thunderbird as many people don't use email clients like that anymore and instead use webmail.
I never have used RSS that much as normally if I want to check for new things on a site, I will just go to the site and look myself.
Are you sure it isn't some addon you have?
Check it out in lynx for example
https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-...
didnt load for me
Closing.
This is why people complain about the unclear and bureaucratic nature of these laws, it leads to an over complicated investigation and compliance isn't always simple - meaning the safest option is to comply at the highest level and degrade the user experience.
The sites plastering those everywhere are doing a malicious compliance, pure and simple
Too bad Google sunset Chrome Flywheel (likely after AMP?): https://research.google/pubs/flywheel-googles-data-compressi...
Opera Mini Turbo was equally popular during 2G/Edge era.
funnily enough, the rise in agentic coding has actually made this on the rise
I can reformat the text any way I like
- AT&T was completely down for us but Verizon and its MVNOs were up
- I had a Verizon MVNO secondary e-sim that came free with a home internet plan, unused until the hurricane hit
- It worked pretty well!
- The day the Verizon disaster internet trucks showed up at the police station in our town my Verizon MVNO internet went down
Non-internet learnings:
- Fill up your vehicle’s fuel or battery before any big storm, we spent a lot of time siphoning and otherwise consolidating fuel to get ourselves and neighbors out of town, particularly because we didn’t know how far we’d have to go to find a gas station with electricity
Now that I think about it, I think you can have multiple eSIMs, but only one can be active at a time.
Unsure why they say 'or more' and what makes that happen.
2 can be active at the same time.
I can't find how many a Pixel can store at the same time though.
The same is the case with pixels, never at least.
Corollary: carry cash, so you can buy things without depending on Point Of Sale systems being on and able to talk to the payment card networks. My favorite nearby ATM dispenses $100 bills, so I can have several hundred tucked in my wallet without taking a lot of space.
Clarification: Sure, keeping a $100 bill tucked away in the wallet for emergencies is a great idea (and I do that too), but wherever you keep emergency supplies, I suggest having a mix of smaller bills.
Let time I visit the USA, many shop don't have changes for $100 bills. I found $20 bills the easiest to use.
(I am not an American, was on a work trip)
My emergency cash stash has a couple $100's and a ton of $5's because I'm not super limited on space, and when everyone else has $20's and needs them broken, a bunch of $5's makes everything easy, and beats carrying a whole bucket of $1's. Learned that at flea-markets.
- When putting in rural/exurb solar, make sure you have a secondary charge source for your house batteries. This can be a car or a propane generator, but check compatibility before buying anything. Solar won’t cut it (storms are cloudy), and propane won’t cut it (no roads, and also, there’s probably a shortage of supply and trucks).
- Whatever cell networks people fall back on will effectively be down (as you saw with verizon)
- all emergency services websites should fall back to web 1.0 forms and static images if they take more than 5-10 sec to load. Loading a pile of JS and CSS to load a fake modal that obscures the content affer 5 min of loading at 2G speeds doesn’t count (looking at you PG&E)
Depends entirely on tank size really.
Standard (in Australia) is 2x45kg household cylinders (chest high to an adult) for household cooking.
(Finish one, switch to the other while waiting for swap).
It's not hard to have eight or more cyclinders on standby and to keep them topped up for when needed.
For rural / quasi industrial, furnaces, generators, etc it's not uncommon to have fixed installation 210kg LPG bulk cylinders filled by supply truck .. and larger.
When disaster strikes a bulk tank lasts a long time if the primary drains on it (eg: a tile or glass furnace) are wound back or turned off.
Eg: https://www.supagas.com.au/for-home/lpg-gas-bottles/tanks
Seems kind of small if you're rural/have regular delivery limitations? I've got a 500 gallon propane tank for domestic use (stove, waterheater, fireplace) and another 500 gallon tank for my generator. The internet says a 500 gallon tank at 80% full (max safe fill) is about 750 kg of propane. We've had a few two day outages, but no three day outages since we moved here, but neighbors report some outages in the 7-10 day timeframe. 500 gallon tanks seem pretty popular around these parts, commercial/government goes bigger, small properties go smaller; plenty of neighbors have no generator and may not have propane either; government runs warming centers if you can get there.
it's not uncommon to have .. 210kg LPG bulk cylinders .. and larger.
> if you're rural/have regular delivery limitations?
Many rural locations here have regular deliveries .. the milk gets picked up every day for example (multiple double tanker trucks worth from, say, the Cowaramup* district alone).
There's no need for a larger tank simply because you're rural unless you explicitly want constant gas at a particular delivery rate sufficient to last out a supply issue of {X} {time units}.
( For example if you run a continuously fired glass furnace + annealers, have a ceramics business as a side hustle, specifically have emergancy services generators for blackouts etc. )
> government runs warming centers if you can get there.
Your local government I assume - this isn't something ours has ever considered TBH.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowaramup,_Western_Australia#A...
A house backup generator uses something like 3kg of propane per hour idle, so that tank will keep your fridge on for ~ 10 days. Our area (outskirts of Silicon Valley) saw 20-30 day power outages with essentially no sun that year. The weather is rapidly worsening due to climate change, but they are also hardening the infrastructure.
Now, with a battery + backup generator + wood stove, you only need to run the generator to charge the house batteries. Assume a duty cycle of a few hours of optimal efficiency generator per day, wood heating, and you can easily exceed the 30 day target. At that point the sun should be out, at least here in California, or at least the roads will be open enough to let the propane supply chain adapt to the demand.
For the EV route, buy a truck or SUV with vehicle to home support, and a house battery that can charge off the vehicle. The truck has 2-4x a house battery in it. This plan assumes there’s a fast charger in town (ideally near the grocery store), and it’s under ~ 100 miles round trip.
Edit: I’ll add local pricing: A used >= 100 kwh ev is about $30K. The generator + permits + tank is > $20k.
With the ev route, you also get a nice car.
I didn’t price out generator + 2000 gallons of propane storage. It’d guess it’s about $30k.
This is such a big one for any event anytime. Better yet, never go below a half-tank on your vehicle. You’ll almost always have enough range to get out of dodge and also have a mobile cooling / heating / charging station if you’re stuck in place. I grew up on an island and what I thought was universal storm advice was clearly not.
During Helene I had to drive 80+ miles from the Clemson, SC area through to Asheville to bail out my sister-in-law and her husband and their two month old stranded in Asheville. They had only two gallons of diesel in their F-250. The drive up I-26 looked like some kind of zombie flick with a line of 50-100 cars on every interstate off ramp leading up to defunct gas stations with crowds of people just meandering about.
If you’re a mild prepper type, GMRS radios (or a jailed broke Baofeng…) are a great tool. I had no cellular service for the majority of my drive. I was able to stay in comms with my “convoy” the whole way. Perhaps as importantly, a spare, unused Jerry can is incredibly valuable. In my case I have gasoline cans but not diesel and so I had to pay a greedy boomer 3-4x market rate to buy one of his four 5 gallon cans in the Lowe’s checkout line to get a clean fuel canister.
It really depended on where you were. In my area everything was down. Literally and figuratively. The only utility that worked was gas.
T-Mobile was the first to come back up but it took weeks. I could occasionally get one bar of LTE if I climbed to the top of the hill but even then I could only send or receive about 1 SMS every few minutes.
Once I was able to get out of the neighborhood I could drive 5 miles away and get cell service and spotty data on Verizon.
NPR's updates were our most reliable way to get information on what was happening.
> - Fill up your vehicle’s fuel or battery before any big storm, we spent a lot of time siphoning and otherwise consolidating fuel to get ourselves and neighbors out of town, particularly because we didn’t know how far we’d have to go to find a gas station with electricity
Having supplies on hand and being patient worked out for us. We waited until 40 was clear and were able to head to the Triad for supplies and gas. In the mean time the neighborhood got together and cut up downed trees and filled in the missing road so it was easier to get in and out of the neighborhood.
- the Comcast Xfinity app is extremely bloated and runs into error after error on a poor connection, yet the only time I ever use it is when I have connection problems. Most other apps I use run smoother under similar circumstances. Boggles the mind why one of the US's largest ISPs wouldn't make their primary customer support portal be lightweight and reliable on spotty cellular data.
In fact, for a long time web forums were largely entirely usable without JS.
See the degradation of GitHub for a great example. You used to be able to interact with most of it without any JS at all; browsing the code repositories, reading and replying to issues, etc. Now it barely shows anything without JS. Of course, I suspect in that case it's deliberate so they can trick you into running a few more tracking and analytics scripts...
- I got caught in the mountains for a few days due to landslides in Nepal. The only available information was relayed by phone between locals. People had no idea of what was going on and their vacation ended on the day the road reopened. It caused a pile up of cars where the road had slid off a few days prior. In some parts, rocks still fell from the cliffs above. We flagged a passing car and asked them to keep us updated on WhatsApp instead. We could have all stayed put if we had that information before.
- During covid I maintained a page with simplified local restrictions and a changelog of new restrictions. The alternative was to follow press conferences and re-read the entire regulation the next day, or keep checking the newspapers. Mine was just a bullet list at a permanent location.
- During the invasion of Ukraine, refugees have set up the most impressive ad hoc information network I have ever seen. It was operational in 24 hours and kept improving for weeks. People sorted out routes, transport, border issues, accommodation, translation and supplies over Telegram, Notion and Google Docs.
Information propagation is critical during emergencies, and people are really bad at it. Setting up a simple website and two-way communication channels makes a huge difference.
1. Habit. We're used to use Telegram for everything: news sources, social network, messaging, memes. Telegram has more capabilities than other apps. You can't realistically move your family and friends to another messaging app because of all of that and the network effect.
2. General attitude of all people towards privacy and sharing data: they don't really care. It's "Who would even care about my data?" and "I've got nothing to hide" all the way.
I doubt most of people ever thought about the topic of trusting a messaging app. It's not the framework they operate in.
There are two global psyops done by I don't know who:
1. That Bitcoin is safe and anonymous.
2. That Telegram is super safe for whatever shady or private stuff you want to do.
One of the best marketing campaigns ever.
I would also want to use this chance to alert everyone who uses Telegram that:
1. It's not e2e by default.
2. They use proprietary encryption protocol. You don't have access to code.
3. I don't think Telegram is profitable, I don't know how it can be with that scale. Which makes you wonder.
4. If you open in-message links, you have a chance of losing your account to hackers thanks to the old vulnerability that hasn't been fixed for years. You literally have to check the list of devices connected to your account every 12 hours if you want to be safe.
This was the case when I got a Rapberry Pi 4 with 1GB of RAM about late 2019. You could run one tab of Chrome, but any more and it would be killed.
(1) https://log.schemescape.com/posts/hardware/farewell-to-a-net...
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Some Topic</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Some Topic</h1>
<p>Information goes here.</p>
<p>Information goes here.</p>
<p>Information goes here.</p>
</body>
</html>
If you decide to add an off-the-shelf wad of CSS, like Pico.css, consider hosting it alongside your HTML (rather than turning it into another third-party dependency and CDN cross-site surveillance tracker). Minified, and single-request.
<!doctype html>
<title>Hello</title>
<h1>Hello World</h1>I run a website that's primarily text-based. When I change the base template, I still check that it works without CSS. This just means semantic HTML.
That being said, CSS is rarely that large. Even after a few years of relative indulgence, the gzipped CSS for the whole website is still something like 20kb.
For Hurricane Helene specifically, my team at Newspack actually worked with Blue Ridge Public Radio and a number of other news organizations in the affected area to set up text versions of their websites for low bandwidth readers[1] and get info to 10s of thousands of people[2].
In fact, it was so successful (maybe not at reaching you specifically though), that we got a grant to roll out a general purpose plain text web solution for breaking news situations to news organizations across the country![3] So I think there may have been a mismatch in that you didn't know about all of the plain text versions of news sites available in your area during the disaster -- that's something we'll have to keep in mind.
[2] https://awards.journalists.org/entries/hell-or-high-water-bp...
As a web developer, I am thinking again about my experience with the mobile web on the day after the storm, and the following week.
I remember trying in vain to find out info about the storm damage and road closures—watching loaders spin and spin on blank pages until they timed out trying to load.
up to that same storm i was a gung-ho let's go ham enthusiast. up to. I lived in a more direct path relative to where most of the repeater users were, so they were complaining about how hard it would be to find ice the next morning than relaying potentially life-altering information about storm tracks or whatever.
I explained to everyone as sternly as i could that this was literally an emergency, which was the primary designation of the tallest repeater in the county, and if they wanted to chit chat with chet they should move to one of the 3 other analog or 2 other digital repeaters in the same area.
nothing doing. I was the arrl tech specialist for my state, too. I completely pulled out of the hobby. I might dabble in the future with low power or beacons or whatever, but VHF/UHF i'm done with local usage.
i know you specifically said AM; however i didn't have an AM radio "handy" during the storm and power outage, etc. 9/10 the NOAA/NWS weather radio service suffices.
Good fun - not much chop for keeping the general public informed via cheap transister radios (although, who has those anymore?).
Our state emergancy services broadcast locally (and at strength from outside affected areas) when updates are required - they have dedicated bands and they routinely interject on the major broadcast radio networks - where fires are, when and where cyclones are expected to cross the coast, etc.
Our very local area volunteer fire units use the equivilant of ham and CB bands with reduced licences - they broadcast lightning ground strikes (at this time of year) and fire / tender / tanker updates as the season progresses (which is right now, harvest time, a lot of equipment out in tinder dry conditions subject to highly active evening lightening storms).
The iPhone / WiFi stuff is great .. but it hasn't yet passed into "considered reliable" in local culture - the networks have crashed under stress and nobody wants response to grind to a halt if a tower goes down, etc.
This very article loaded 2.49MB (uncompressed) over 30 requests. It's served using Next.js (it does actually load fine with JS disabled).
Ironically this is a great opportunity for the author to have made a stronger point. It could have gone beyond the abstract desire of "going back to basics" to perhaps demo reworking itself to be served using plain HTML and CSS without any big server-side frameworks.
Our best source of information, even after we started to get a bit of service, was an inReach. I messaged a friend far from the region and asked them really specific questions like, "Tell me when I can get from our house to I-26 and then south to South Carolina."
Yes, absolutely, emergency information sites should be as light as possible. And satellite devices are incredibly useful when everything local goes down.
Local copies of important information on your mobile device. Generally your laptops are not going to see much use. Mobile apps tend to fake local data and store lots of things to the cloud. We tend to ignore such things like backups and local copies nowadays. Most of the time we can get away without any worry here but consider keeping a copy of things like medications and their non commercial names for situations like this as well.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231208000921/https://10kbclub....
I find that the sites designed around being small are usually nice to read since the effort is put in the content not the layout.
Additionally a lot of great sites can be found through something like https://wiby.me/ or different protocols like gopher or gemini.
[1] https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-... [2] https://crukorg.github.io/engineering-guidebook/docs/fronten...
That bulleted newsletter list being the most useful thing says everything.
Many years ago, Google had a service I would use pre-Smartphone days to search when I was away from the PC and needed info for like a restaurant’s number. You would text 46645 and it would send you search results. It was useful during hurricanes.
tl;dr Use dark mode and set f.lux (or the equivalent) to Cave Painting. Helped me out a lot
Another endlessly frustrating aspect is unfortunately Facebook. For better or worse, it's become a hub of emergency information using local facebook groups. In an emergency you want a feed of chronological information and facebook insists on engaging you by showing 'relevant' posts out of order.
What saved us from a news deficit after Helene was that we had 2 portable AM/FM radios. Both of the radios took batteries and one of them you could even charge via a hand crank. I highly recommend having a portable AM/FM radio of some kind. Blue Ridge Public Radio (our local NPR) was amazing during this time. Their offices are located right in downtown, which never lost power, so they were able to keep operating immediately after the storm.
I also feel this pain of bloated sites taking forever to load when I'm traveling. I'm on an old T-Mobile plan that I've had since around 2001 that comes with free international roaming in 215+ countries. The only problem is that it's a bit throttled. I know that I could just buy a prepaid SIM, or now I can use an eSIM vendor like Saily, but I'm too cheap and/or the service is just good enough that I'm willing to wait the few extra seconds. Using Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin helps some, but not enough (also I just switched to iPhone last month). I've definitely been on websites that take forever to load because there's just so much in the initial payload, sometimes painfully slow. I don't think enough developers are testing their sites using the throttling options in the dev tools.
*4KB webpage files*
So a website where each page does not exceed 4KB. This includes whatever styling and navigation needed. Surprisingly you can share a lot of information even with such constraints. Bare bone html is surprisingly compact and the browser already does a whole lot of the heavy lifting.
Why 4KB? Because that used to be the default page size in x86 hardware. So you can grab the whole thing in one chunk.
This whole comment is not 1KB.
In some villages, where plenty of stone is available, people used it for everything - roof slabs, pillars, walls, flooring, water storage bowls etc. Also, villages which had plenty of wood around, they used it for everything.
As techies, we say there is an app for everything, or there is a web-technology for everything. When you have a hammer in hand, everything looks like a nail.
Restaurant websites mentioned — the majority of restaurant web sites I’ve encountered were much more annoying and difficult to read than a PDF, even on a small phone screen. Or should I say, especially on a small phone screen. Some would make a 32 inch monitor feel cramped.
1. Identify core functionality. 2. Make that functionality available using the simplest technology. 3. Enhance!
This initial map style would be the equivalent of a "text-only" website.
Blocked by Vercel's turbopack bundle analyzer's bugs though, because before optimizing the tiles, I need to optimize the JS that loads the tiles.
I haven't figured a way to load a Maplibre map server side, so the JS must be ready before the map starts to get loaded.
I'm sure there are more proxies around.
Now the favicon (5.92KB) is larger than the article (5.16KB). Much better than the original (4.11MB)
I built this repo as a Helene response repo, trying to use an llm to help get resources over text message. https://github.com/realityinspector/supply_drop_ai
wonder if you could get to news over sms, use an llm to compress to minimum viable text?
I think with a little effort they could make it pretty frictionless for their users who it turn would be happy to provide it.
The web could in theory support text-first content, but it won't. The Gemini protocol, though not perfect, was built to avoid extensibility that inevitably leads us away from text. I long for the day more bloggers make their content available on Gemspace, the way we see RSS as an option on some blogs.
The web will continue to stray from text-first content because it is too easy to add things that are not text.
But the progressive, text first loading, would be readable from the get go, even if further downloads stalled.
Truly a sign of our times
Give me a minimal / plain text website every day, it's not just the link speed.
I have a text-only CLI utility to read BBC news: the w3m terminal-mode Web browser. (Substitute Lynx, links, elinks2, or any other TMWB of your preference.)
The experience is, unfortunately, kind of shit, because BBC (as with far too many other websites) fails to display well in a terminal-mode browser, but it at least works. And I can use the same browser on any other website.
The problem with site-specific tools, which includes of course mobile apps, is that now instead of invoking a general-purpose reader on any site, you have to choose both the site and the reader, and are dependent on that reader application / utility being continuously updated as the site itself changes.
(And, yes, I've written my own site-specific renderers, including one which produces a "newspaper"-formatted page based on the CNN "lite" website, which I've discussed on HN and elsewhere:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43723661>
Longer description and screenshots:
<https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/114356066459105122>
The page takes about 10 minutes to generate (a bunch of serial article requests), but makes for good offline reading.
The fact that he was struck by such an evident truth means that he is (hopefully: was) part of the problem.
<html> <pre> TEXT </pre> </hml>
> 5.1 MB transferred
Ironic.
Get some perspective. Some of us have to live on 500kbit/s. The modern web is hell, and because it doesn't impact anybody with money, nobody gives a shit.
Some oft-cited examples are curb cuts (the sloped ramps cut into curbs for sidewalk access) and closed-captioning (useful in noisy bars or at home with a sleeping baby).
There are many examples from the web where designing with constraints can lead to broadly more usable sites- from faster loading times (mobile or otherwise) to semantic markup for readers, etc.
- How severe is the impact, and
- How close is the default state to the constraint
Kerb cuts help everyone. Kids, the elderly, disabled people, and anyone distracted by their phone are all less likely to fall on their face and lose a tooth.
Web accessibility helps websites go from unusable for disabled people, to usable.
On the other hand, when a dev puts a website on a diet it might make it load in 50ms instead of 200ms for 99.9% of users, and load in 2 seconds instead of 2 minutes for 0.1%.
So it doesn’t impact anyone meaningfully for the site to be heavy. And for that edge case 0.1%, they’ll either leave, or stick around waiting and stab that reload button for as long as it takes to get the info they need.
As shameful as it is, web perf work has almost zero payoff except at the limit. Anyone sensible therefore has far more to gain by investing in more content or more functionality.
The incentives are there. Web developers are just, on average, extremely bad at their jobs. The field has been made significantly more accessible than it was in decades past, but the problem with accessibility is that it enables people who have no fundamental understanding of programming to kitbash libraries together like legos and successfully publish websites. They can't optimize even if they tried, and the real problem for the rest of us is they can't secure user data even if they try.
People go to Google expecting it to quickly get them info. On other sites the info is worth waiting an extra second for.
At Google scale, a drop in traffic results in a massive corresponding drop in revenue. But most websites don’t even monetize.
They’re both websites but that’s all they have in common.
The vast majority of web traffic is directed towards websites that are commercial in nature[1], though. Any drop in traffic is a drop in revenue. If you are paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to provide a portal wherein people visit your employer's website and give them money (or indirectly give them money via advertisement impressions), and shrug your shoulders at the idea of 50% of visitors bouncing, you are not good at your job. But hey, at least you'd be in good company, because most web developers are like that, which is why the web is as awful to use as it is.
[1]The only website in the top 10 most visited that is not openly commercial is Wikipedia, but it still aggressively monetizes by shaking down its visitors for donations and earns around $200 million a year in revenue. They would certainly notice if 50% or even 10% of their visitors were bouncing too.
Then Github comes back and sins are forgotten.