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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me his rationale for having websites mailed to himself?

"I have several free web browsers on my laptop, but I generally do not look at web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites operated for or by the GNU Project, FSF or me. I fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly."

Source: http://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Maybe because he's just interested in the textual content.

Given the amount of web sites he blogs about each day, I can't imagine he still uses this email workflow. On May 31st he made more than 30 posts:

http://www.stallman.org/archives/2013-mar-jun.html

Ads, tracking cookies, annoying JavaScript, Facebook like buttons (tracking), inane comments just to name a few. Modern websites are pretty horrible.

Everything but the inane comments I can understand. If you want to avoid those, you might as well just move to a Tibetan monastery.

It just seems like an odd, circuitous route to take. I would have expected him to just use Lynx or something.

It may be because of being able to read and formulate a response offline (Stallman seems to spend a lot of his time travelling, not all locations allow permanent wifi connections). It may also be a simple 'single firehose' approach - all tasks as email.

I think the "inane comments" one is a joke about /g/, they sent him a mail asking him to come and visit the site and he responded with something akin to "I did but there was only inane comments".

Ah, somebody picked up on that. Although, I should point out I generally cringe when I see a Facebook thread or something similar at the bottom of every damn page on every site.

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