
Lightweight versions of websites without all the bloat - pmarin
https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-websites
======
asark
We need a Web again. A hypertext document browsing system. Update the basic
elements like they should have been updated 20+ years ago (sortable tables
seems like a no-brainer to include in base HTML, there's got to be a way to
update frames so they suck less and fit 90+% of the legit uses of AJAXy page
updates, improved form elements like you get in a real GUI toolkit, file
upload with preview, and so on) but NO javascript, NO talking to any server
behind the user's back. Once the page loads my network connection should be
silent until I click a link. I should get a preview of what a form's about to
send. Anything but a GET to any server but the one I'm currently on, flatly
disallowed. Somewhere you can browse hypertext documents with high
performance, in safety, with no spying.

This one can be abandoned to spyware and apps. Whatever. That's fine. But I
don't want safe hyptertext browsing comingled with the same program that can
and constantly does load spyware and other abusive junk.

~~~
jlarocco
There's nothing stopping you from browsing that way if it's what you want.
Install uMatrix, uBlock, and a couple other extensions, and you can lock down
pages as much as you want. You can even take it a step further and use an
older browser that doesn't support the modern features you're complaining
about.

Unfortunately, what you can't do is force everybody else to participate. HTML3
still works great in modern browsers, but the people making the sites want to
use modern features.

~~~
anoncake
> There's nothing stopping you from browsing that way if it's what you want.

There is. Pages that don't work without Javascript.

~~~
jlarocco
That was my point. You can control your browser, but you can't control what
other people offer up.

~~~
anoncake
And that's what's stopping them from browsing a sane web.

~~~
jlarocco
Sorry, but nobody's twisting their arm to use those websites.

Making yourself out to be a victim doesn't make it so.

~~~
krageon
Saying that you have perfect choice when half of the things you _need_ to use
use dark patterns rife with abuse does not make it true either.

------
mg
Great to see a post about lightweight websites having over 100 upvotes.

To me, the "heaviness" of the web is making it much less enjoyable then it
could be.

As a user, I regularly read the HN discussion of an article rather then the
article itself. Simply because HN is so lean and other websites are usually
bloated. So bloated, that I prefer to infer the content from the HN discussion
just so I can avoid visiting the website.

I run multiple very lightweight websites myself:

[http://www.gnod.com](http://www.gnod.com)

I categorically refuse to add heavy assets or frontend libraries.

Many of my developer friends insist that "Normal users don't care!". I am not
so sure. I wonder how big the target audience for "Lightweight websites"
really is. Would love to see a poll that asks people "How much do you like the
typical website? What are the most common reasons that make you dislike a
website?".

~~~
pdimitar
> _Many of my developer friends insist that "Normal users don't care!". I am
> not so sure._

I am with you. I've spoken to a lot of non-technical users in my life. Their
very typical and often response on the matter is "it is how it is, I cannot
change it, of course it's annoying but I have no alternative" \-- this is
about ads, heavyweight sites and possible tracking/spying.

So IMO most non-technical people accept it as a fact of life but would rejoice
if the Web became lightweight again.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _So IMO most non-technical people accept it as a fact of life but would
> rejoice if the Web became lightweight again._

Yup. There's also a subset of non-tech people who don't have a basic mental
model for how things work; from those, I hear "my computer is slow, probably
has viruses, could you help?". I come, and the computer is often fine - it's
popular websites that just went through another bloat-up cycle, and the
computer struggles with them. Installing uBlock can make such computer live
for another year, but ultimately people end up discarding perfectly good
hardware just because the web keeps accruing bloat.

~~~
krapp
>So IMO most non-technical people accept it as a fact of life but would
rejoice if the Web became lightweight again.

What most non-technical people want is for the web they're using _now_ to work
faster. The problem is, the people who want to make the web lightweight again
seem to want to do so by eliminating the modern web entirely. No one seems to
be asking how we could make the web that exists, and that billions of people
actually use, better.

~~~
pdimitar
I am asking. What would you propose?

------
qznc
I recently started a subreddit with a similar goal:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SpartanWeb/.compact](https://www.reddit.com/r/SpartanWeb/.compact)

Explanation:
[http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/spartan_web.html](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/spartan_web.html)

~~~
mdibaiee
This is cool! I would appreciate pull-requests to add these to the repository

Otherwise I will take a look at them later on myself

~~~
qznc
Submitted a few I found fitting: [https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-
websites/compare/ma...](https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-
websites/compare/master...qznc:patch-1)

There is no section for individual blogs.

------
car12
I wonder if anyone here would agree to pay a small subscription fee, say
$2/month, to get a text only version of websites. No to minimal images, no to
almost minimal CSS flash/bloat/design. Pretty close to reading things on a
newspaper.

~~~
cmroanirgo
What's wrong with the various reader modes that Safari and FF already have?
They're great at de-formatting a page to it's base article. No cruft. It's
very newspaper style. (Chrome has reader plugins that can doing this too)

Not sure what your $2 would be doing another than adding an actor between me
and the page I wish to read. For privacy purposes, I'll be keeping well clear
of such "solutions".

~~~
basch
Dont you normally have to wait for the heavy site to load before switching to
reader?

------
tmlbl
This is fantastic. I have a thing for older laptops and many modern websites
are too bloated to run on them. I might use some of these on every machine...
why waste cycles when I just want to read?

~~~
jaabe
I have a 2018 MacBook Pro, and reddit “lags” in safari unless I use the old
version.

~~~
pmarin
On my netbooks I have been using the html only version of Gmail because it
became faster than the modern web app.

~~~
andai
I use it everywhere now. It loads instantly, it's amazing. The only thing I
miss is the auto categorization, I have to filter out all the newsletters with
my brain now.

~~~
krrrh
You can also setup filters which are easy to do in gmail and work better than
autocategorization.

------
TACIXAT
I don't like that this conflates bloat with JS.

I have a minimal chat application that heavily relies websockets and JS, that
said, it strives to be data minimal. The heaviest part is the initial load of
emoji images which get cached. Other than that there are no third party
scripts or data transfer.

I get that JS can suck and be abused, but I don't really understand the
complete allergy to it. A websocket implementation is going to have a lot less
overhead than page loads for everything.

~~~
userbinator
The article is talking about _websites_ , not webapps --- i.e. document-
oriented sites, for which JS is really not necessary. For a realtime
interactive application like chat, however, the circumstances are different.

~~~
dpau
I'm not sure that's the case, there are a number of the sites on this list,
like Facebook and Reddit, that I definitely wouldn't categorize as _document-
oriented_. It seems more of an issue with both how resource intensive the JS-
heavy sites are, as well as the purpose of the JS- is it used to track me and
invade my privacy, or does the JS have a legitimate use (as in a chat
application)? Personally I LOVE JS-powered websites/webapps, as it means that
as a lone developer I have the ability to create a website as powerful as a
desktop application, without developing multiple versions for each OS/app
store. So I, too, don't wish to see a massive backlash against JS, only
against _bad JS_.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Facebook we could dispute once we include the chat (though the chat is
available as separate Messenger site/app), but without it it's almost entirely
a document-oriented experience. Profiles, timeline, posts, comments - those
are all just glorified documents with forms. The same is true about the
entirety of Reddit - it's document-oriented by nature.

Consider HN as an example of a document-oriented social media site _actually
implemented_ as documents.

~~~
dpau
Even the chat application mentioned previously could be viewed as (and
implemented as) "documents with forms". This oversimplification doesn't help
us much. It's the powerful, real-time interactivity that javascript provides
that is being debated here.

~~~
naniwaduni
The question is whether the real-time interactivity is _desirable_. For a chat
widget, it almost certainly is. It's less clear for something like Reddit,
where the main mechanism for getting updates to the page you're currently
viewing is to explicitly refresh.

------
tpfour
Why is this the top voted story barely 40 minutes after submission? Are people
really excited for 20 links, most of which aren't even "lite" websites?

Every now and then there's an odd top story on HN which makes me wonder who
actually reads this site. I guess I'm not hip enough!

~~~
badfrog
I'd guess there's high correlation between people who want this and people who
use emacs, which is a non-trivial portion of HN readers.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Don't know how one relates to the other, but I for one know a couple of web
sites which UX would vastly improve, were they accessed through Emacs instead
of the web browser.

------
dorgo
I would like to see more developement towards features like the "reading mode"
in browsers. There is no good reason why the style of text should vary between
websites. The same is true for many other "features". Why do tables with data
look (and feel) different across websites? Why does every website implement
user registration/login in it's own unique way? Every website has it's own
navigation style/concept - instead of allowing me to use my choice for all
websites (as a browser setting). The downsite though is less
creativity/innovation.

~~~
basch
Im with you.

Id like to see a browser come out that does this. Reading mode by default,
along with some p2p network of userstyles and templates. Opera sort of did
this once, where the community maintained .js patches to make websites work
better in the browser. It would be nice to have a set of standard browser
templates, and then be able to have an on/off button for "allow most popular
community patches to load automatically," those patches basically being css
tweaks for sites that dont quite fit a template.

------
Theodores
The examples on the page are still fundamentally bloated. Take a look at the
source of any example and you will find the regular div soup albeit not
burdened by 106 cookies and 46 tracking scripts.

The web has HTML5 elements and the CSS grid layout engine that can be made
fully responsive with maintainable CSS variables to look excellent in
evergreen browsers. However nobody is able to code up a page this way as there
is so much technical debt in the way web development teams work and the hacks
that can't be dispensed with overnight.

Recently I tried to make a CMS form look pretty. The forms needed have to have
the simplest markup, e.g. label followed by input, label followed by input
with those inputs having HTML5 niceties such as placeholders and the 'required
fields' being styled with simple CSS that is based on 'required=true' being on
the input boxes. However, the templates had two divs and spans around the
labels and two more divs around the inputs with a container div holding it all
together, everything decorated with untold class tags. To make this look good
and responsive in CSS grid I needed to get rid of all of it apart from the
inputs and labels. If I didn't have confidence in what I was doing I would
have just added yet more CSS and yet more complexity.

Anyone can make stuff complex, making stuff simple and concise is an entirely
different skill. None of the examples on this list have fully grasped what a
modern web page should be like. It is as if nobody has taken the time to learn
how to write content with the correct elements and then style it up for the
evergreen browsers people actually use with modern CSS.

~~~
bo1024
Any suggested resources or examples to learn from?

~~~
Theodores
I do not actually see a concise course out there that puts it all together. I
am a big fan of Rachel Andrews, Jen Simmons and Lea Verou, however, at the
moment it really requires some DIY effort to get everything learned. You also
need a project such as your own portfolio site to have a go with.

Given there is no guide out there I think I had better write one.

------
kgwxd
I was unaware of reddit.compact, looks even better than old.reddit.

------
badfrog
Does anybody know of a good browser extension to apply some default CSS to
sites you visit? It took me just 4 lines to turn the CSS-free NPR site into
something that I enjoy reading.

Before and after: [https://imgur.com/a/EJympO9](https://imgur.com/a/EJympO9)

~~~
andai
font-family, font-size, max-width, what's the fourth one?

~~~
badfrog
line-height

------
incadenza
CNN is night and day...

~~~
bluedino
The regular CNN site isn't even usable in Lynx

------
peterwwillis
HN pedantry of the day: 'lite' vs 'light'. I screamed internally a bit at "a
list of _lite_ websites", so naturally I looked up the definition and
etymology.

It turns out that _lite_ is basically a modifier for product names. Early in
the 20th century it was used for products like "Auto-Lite" and "Adjusto-Lite",
apparently as a diminutive form of "light". But then later it was used to
connote fewer calories (as in "Miller Lite", "Kikkoman Lite") whereas other
products still use the full form ("Yoplait Light"). _Lite_ 's other definition
is "diminished or lacking in substance or seriousness ... innocuous or
unthreatening", implying an almost childish, immature, or unthreatening form.

In this website's case, the list is specifically referring to the "weight" or
"heft" of the websites, relative to the content which isn't solely what the
user is looking for. It also is not referring to a product name. That falls
squarely under the definition for _light_ , and not _lite_.

But the name of the repo, _awesome-lite-websites_ , can be seen as a product
name. So the word _lite_ fits for the name, but not in the description.
(indeed, in the README the word "lightweight" is correctly used)

[1] [https://grammarist.com/words/lite/](https://grammarist.com/words/lite/)
[2] [https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/10/lite-or-light-
whi...](https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/10/lite-or-light-which-
spelling-is-right.html) [3]
[https://www.etymonline.com/word/lite](https://www.etymonline.com/word/lite)

------
blaze33
The web brought us easy access to static content. Then, interactive web apps
appeared and mixed code with content. Easy access to content need up
restricted by new rules designed by app owners.

So, could a better separation of content from software improve the situation?

------
manigandham
The twitter mobile version is also the "new" standard desktop version if you
enable it.

------
ehonda
Should also check out wiby.me, it is a search engine that only contains
lightweight websites.

------
Ultramanoid
Added +2000 bonus points if : uBlock (0), as in text.npr.org or HN.

------
jbverschoor
Why does ddg do a POST request?

------
faissaloo
Is there a plugin that automatically sends me to the lighter version of a site
if it exists?

