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treesknees

Several news sites offer text only versions.

https://lite.cnn.com/

https://text.npr.org/

https://wttr.in/

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.

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That CNN website is great, except it still has a huge cookie banner. Looking at the cookies of the site, I think the only cookie it sets is that i clicked on the banner. Most of the size of the page is also related to the banner it seems.

You can’t put a price on some round-rim glasses wearing EU bureaucrat named Klaus-Dietrich von Regulieren sleeping soundly because of that banner.

If I’ve understood the grandparent post correctly, they don’t need the banner. They wouldn’t need it if the only cookie they set were a functional 1st-party cookie, and since that sole cookie is just to track cookie banner status, they especially don’t need it.

But taking the time to investigate that, get it approved by legal, etc. all takes longer than just slapping a cookie banner component on it.

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.

But it is not. the text of that legislation is very clear.

Yes but the only thing better than being compliant is being compliant twice over so there's absolutely no debate about compliance.

I much rather companies be scared into complying and have some spare banners than companies having grey area free-for-alls with my data.

Eh, it took me all of 2 days to strip all the unnecessary cookies out of our product, and convince management to leave out the giant unnecessary cookie banner.

The sites plastering those everywhere are doing a malicious compliance, pure and simple

I looked at a CNN "lite" article, and it includes 560KB of stuff (lots and lots of CSS declarations) in addition to the actual 11KB of article content.

While still wasteful, CSS is one of those things you can do astronomically wrong before it starts being noticeable. Case in point here: inlining 560 kb of CSS with the page and just sending it with the entire HTML file each time is only ~61 kb of actual network transfer to load the article (due to brotli encoding).

For me in Firefox it only loads the article's HTML (50-70kb) and the favicon (7kb).

Are you sure it isn't some addon you have?

It could be the cookie banner appearing.

It is, the content loads first, then the js for the cookie banner, then the favicon. If the js fails to load (I blocked the request as a test) the page loads just fine, it isn't blocked by that.

I bet you're using uBlock Origin

The articles HTML is ~60 kb compressed and ~10x that uncompressed, which accounts for both apparent sizes.

The point is that it would still work if you block JS, CSS and graphics.

Check it out in lynx for example

Ever tried a TUI browser like lynx?

In the Netherlands the public broadcaster still publishes news through Teletekst:

https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-...

Which is cool but it's not web, and few people have working TV reception that supports it at the moment. The web version of Teletekst (https://nos.nl/teletekst) is over 3 MB in size.

Are there no APIs with smaller and faster responses? The Swedish equivalent has --even a fairly respectable terminal client.

It's better than web! You don't usually view it with Internet. You view it with either an antenna or with broadcast cable. It's up even when the Internet is down.

Using the lite subdomain is a great way to read all the subscriber articles as well. Was reminded of the lite site during some annoyingly aggressive A/B testing CNN was doing a few months back.

In terms of a standard, it would be nice if "reader mode" were standardized to request a text-only minimal formatting version of the site.

Oooh... can you imagine if servers actually took the hint and sent only text if the client provided Accept: text/markdown, text/plain headers?

> Accept: text/markdown

funnily enough, the rise in agentic coding has actually made this on the rise

https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite

> https://wttr.in/

didnt load for me

Me neither.

Did load for me.

Closing.

I miss RSS.

I still use it. RSS is dead, long live RSS.

And Javascript free web...

IMO, we need a RSS optimized browser that would also block Javascript before user interaction (or even more).

How would "RSS optimized" work in the context of a browser?

> great if there was some standard that allowed these to be easily found

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.

$ ssh teletekst.nl

oh my god.

Maybe there could be a service which translates any website into a trimmed-down text-only version.

Firefox's Reader mode is pretty great. Doesn't reduce network traffic but makes almost any page more readable.

Google also used to have a go app which they deprecated later on, while now i think about it what is the use of having a go app, if the websites which are shown in search results are not optimised for slower networks.

DuckDuckGo has a js-free version of their website at https://html.duckduckgo.com/

I view every website as text-only

I can reformat the text any way I like

Well, there is RSS.

Thanks for sharing, i almost was not sure if the last part was sarcasm. Html itself was the standard, then when it got bloated we got rss. This seems like it’s not a problem of a lack of standards. It’s the company choosing not to promote it.

RSS is just a list of links to webpages, maybe with summaries. The readers generally fetch those webpages and filter out the text, but every browser has equivalent functionality now. You can do it with literally any HTML page, though some websites try to fight it (since depending on the reader, it neuters ads).

RSS feeds used to contain the full article. That changed when everyone wanted to monetize their blogs.

RSS still contains full articles on a lot of personal sites. As you said, it’s about monetisation and control and when you’re writing with no plan to monetize there’s no point in not serving full content.

Yeah, and that’s my point. The problem is not technological, you can make a super readable HTML site by just putting text in <p> tags, and RSS readers for blogs that didn’t rug-pull their content still work fine. People lost interest in giving out something for nothing, so now the web is an ad-infested mess.

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.

I suppose I meant more of a best practice - if every news site could be found at the subdomain of lite.XYZ.com, or perhaps some way for the browser to request specifically no images or styles, it’d be easier for the end user to find.

RSS is a good point that I didn’t consider. Although it tends to be a summary and hyperlink to the main site.

It’s too bad that WML from WAP is not used anymore.

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 spent so much time tuning the WAP site for the forum I worked for back in 2008.

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.

We could use markdown.

It's a crying shame that a browser can't fetch a plain vanilla goodstuff.md file and display it natively.

Ideally IMO this would be accept headers. You're asking for the same semantic content but a different format. I'm not sure if there's a nice way of specifying html but in a minimal sense (we do quality with images, perhaps linked), however these could mostly be text/plain or text/markdown (and it'd be nice if that was then formatted properly by the browser).

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.

It is more to do with the fact that vast majority of people aren't going to bother subscribing to an RSS feed. I am on a freelancer slack group that supposed to have a RSS feed for jobs. The feed is often broken for weeks because most people don't use it.

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.

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