
Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback - georgecmu
https://www.poynter.org/news/text-only-news-sites-are-slowly-making-comeback-heres-why
======
kinkrtyavimoodh
By all means today's content websites are an abomination, but I don't see why
we need to throw the baby out with the bath water by completely rejecting any
attempt at styling websites and going back on all readability best practices.

I see a lot of websites now which, in an attempt to reject all the nonsense,
end up rejecting even basic CSS, and you are subjected to browser width text
in Times New Roman with ugly blue underlined links (danluu.com is a good
example. Such great content that I love to read but, to be honest, ugly).
Surely there is a middle ground?

Something as simple as the following can make your website look neat and
readable:

    
    
      body {
        font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
        max-width: 800px;
        margin: 0 auto;
      }
      
      a {
        text-decoration: none;
      }
    

Some very very minimal frameworks like Sakura attempt to do just that
([https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura](https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura))

~~~
avian
> you are subjected to browser width text

Some of us consider it a feature that a website allows the reader to freely
resize the browser window (and the text with-in) to the width they consider
comfortable.

~~~
endless1234
So if you want to use for example maps on one tab and read text on another,
the best UX would be to have users resize their browser when changing tabs?

There are few reasons why a line of text should be longer than, say, 800 (css)
pixels, but having the browser full screen might still be a good idea for more
app-y sites.

~~~
avian
I would use a different browser window for maps. Even with tabs, window
maximization is usually one click away, so not that much of a hassle.

But I agree that I commonly see people having their browser window maximized
all the time (on huge monitors, to a great waste of on-screen space). I think
the fact that they became accustomed to that is an unfortunate consequence of
modern web design.

~~~
WWLink
Microsoft Windows enforced maximizing everything like that since the 3.x days.
Every other OS tried to enforce not doing that - some taking it to an extreme!
I recall when the "maximize" button in OS X was a "zoom" button that stretched
the window vertically, but it'd only stretch a window as wide as the content
demanded.

Of course, the Windows users whined and whined and whined about that until
Apple decided to make everything go fullscreen super easily.

So anyway, I love seeing people use 34" ultrawides to browser websites with
their browser window maximized. It's a ridiculous waste of space. XD

~~~
baq
it's actually super easy to make a window take only half a screen in windows
8+ - move it to the edge of the screen. in windows 10, you can also move it to
the corner to make it take 1/4th. shortcuts of win+left/right do similar
things and also exist since win 8 at least.

now whether these people are aware of that and whether they say that having
2800x1200 window is fine for them is a completely different thing...

~~~
rocqua
Those same shortcuts are definitely in Win 7. I'd guess they came from Vista.

------
agumonkey
These are fine technical reasons.

I'll add some human ones:

\- vanilla html webpages had way more actual content [1]

\- they don't burden you with updates, social sharing

[1] nowadays very often you run into a site with header, menu, flashing area,
related articles, footer, cookie warning, etc etc. In the middle of all this
you can barely see the first paragraph. And when you scroll down you realize
there's only two of them. html5/css3 improved the wrong factors, or at least
gave people the wrong idea about where to spend time

~~~
pwaai
I miss the 90s web I used to browse with Netscape Navigator. I really liked
static navigation menus where I didn't have to stop and infer the
functionalities from an icon or hidden expendable/scrolling menus.

I made my first website with it when I was 11 (still have it on a cd rom)...it
was so simple to use. In fact, a lot of stuff in the late 90s to the early
2000s were very approachable as a curious noob. I started tinkering with
QBASIC during 1997 on an old 286 with a monochrome monitor (still have it),
and when I got a Windows computer and I tried to make a Warez site on
Geocities lol....manually searching altavista for 50mb rar parts compressing
Playstation ISO images on a 56k modem, hosted on myspace.com (when it used to
be a file storage)...it took all summer to compile but again _everything was
easier_ because people didn't give a shit what the site looked like, they just
cared about what they could get for free.

Now it seems impossible to get away without some trendy UI framework or
experts reminding us how we are doing it wrong...which ironically increased
the webpage filesize to 196kbps mp3 files that works on modern devices.

~~~
qznc
> miss the 90s web I used to browse with Netscape Navigator. I really liked
> static navigation menus where I didn't have to stop and infer the
> functionalities from an icon or hidden expendable/scrolling menus.

You romanticize. We made confusing menus as well with JavaScript (called
DynamicHTML back then), Flash, and Java plugins. We were proud of fire and
water effects and other gimmicks.

~~~
krapp
_cough_ JS enabled form dropdowns and iframes and imagemaps... _cough_

And then Superfish when you wanted to be serious.

------
pwaai
> Bowden: Text in HTML is the way to go here; you cover accessibility issues
> and SEO bots, while simultaneously also being usable on the maximum number
> of devices possible. HTML and CSS are forgiving in the sense that you can
> make mistakes in them, and something will still be rendered to the user.
> Browsers are built with backwards compatibility, so combining them all
> grants you the extended coverage. Meaning that basic sites will work on
> nearly any phone. Any computer. Any browser.

So many modern javascript heavy websites that are pain to build, pain to
index, pain to maintain, pain to download and consume, painful to support
older devices. We got here because it was trendy...and now we've come to a
full circle.

~~~
endemic
From a pragmatic perspective: adding a level of interactivity via JavaScript
requires a lot of work and/or $$$. Text content Just Works.

~~~
KozmoNau7
And think of disabled people who use screen readers and similarly limited
interfaces. A simple text-based website works so much better with these tools
than a JS and AJAX abomination.

------
jdowner
I find it astonishing how much of my laptops resources are occupied by a web
browser. But I came to believe that it was not necessarily a problem with the
web browsers per se but that each website would have a variety of javascript
constantly running, and most of that code is not providing any information
that I want. So I have turned off javascript in the browser. It breaks many
sites, but, especially for news sites, it makes for a quieter experience.

I also like to archive many of the articles that I read, but I don't like
keeping bookmarks. So I wrote a small utility to convert html to text by
combining 'readability' (python) and lynx (text-base web browser), which does
a nice job of formatting the content and storing the hyperlinks as footnotes.
This archive is also nice and easy to index if you are so inclined.

~~~
gkya
I have this project of moving most of my browsing to EWW (the native web
browser in Emacs) and using a full-fledged web browser only when I need to use
some web app. But many content-only websites are going with completely
dynamically rendered pages with React or what not, so all you have is void at
worst if you disable JS or view with a text-only browser, and garbled up
unreadable stuff if you're lucky. Also e.g. the comment hierarchy of HN does
not render nicely with text browsers.

~~~
jdowner
Agreed. I am using opera at the moment with javascript turned off by default.
But there are some sites I want to use that are simply non-functional without
javascript enabled. I add those sites to a list of exceptions. However, as a
result of having javascript off by default, I will sometimes find a site that
I cannot view and it makes me ask the question -- do I really want to see this
content? is this a site that I want to add to my list of exceptions? I find it
useful to ask those questions and step back from browsing to reflecting on
whether that is the best use of my time right then. ymmv.

~~~
gkya
That's what I used to do with xombrero actually. Xombrero was my browser of
love... If I was any good at C programming, I'd port it to WebKit 2 (I
actually started the project, thinking of hacking my way to really learning C
and the relevant APIs, but I was daunted and gave up). With FF, which is what
I use nowadays, it's way too bothersome to work with that. UBlock kind-of
helps, but I do miss block-by-default days...

------
ezequiel-garzon
Great news! On a related front, I find it appalling that a $1000+ device that
can map your face, tell you where you are and act as a real-time assistant
renders unstyled HTML with absurdly tiny font size. (Things are still sane
enough that the viewport tag will eventually become part of CSS, not HTML
[1].) And pelase don't suggest Safari's Reader View as an alternative: it will
happily skip tables and short paragraphs, without any warning. Moreover, if it
didn't do these things, why not make that Reader View the Deafault View for
CSS-less HTML documents? Arrrgh!

[1] [https://www.w3.org/TR/css-device-adapt-1/#viewport-
meta](https://www.w3.org/TR/css-device-adapt-1/#viewport-meta)

------
niftich
"Lite" versions of news sites are a smart compromise between two competing
forces: the desire to appeal to audiences that are put off by garish,
heavyweight sites, and to do so in a way that doesn't endanger the revenue
they get from all the trackers and advertising on their fat sites.

By making the text-only version a separate destination, most of their traffic
still flows to their multimedia site by default and by habit.

The light version is always advertised by them for specific use-cases only:
quick access in emergencies and for usage in "emerging markets" (inaccurate
marketing-speak for low-bandwidth connections on low-power devices).

The market forces behind text-only news sites are not unlike those behind AMP
links, Facebook Instant Articles, and the Apple News app. News sites want
their news to be read, but not at the cost of not getting paid. It's a
difficult problem to solve, and these "secondary" text sites typically get the
content in front of the most ad-averse eyeballs anyway, so they're not
currently a threat.

------
grx
The rise of static site generators was a similar topic some months ago, I
think those two play together very well.

There seems to be a trend in disconnecting content and interactive input
elements, sourcing out handling of comment systems to providers like Disqus.
It allows a smaller publishing interface without the need to invest in big
backends. As soon as there is no more input handling needed on my
infrastructure, migrating to static content is a logical step.

Secondly, I hold myself to the same standards I want to see from other website
owners: no bloated adscripts, no tracking and no excessive execution of code
inside my browser.

Pages that do not display content with disabled Javascript should rethink
their priorities - it not only excludes people with no JS, screen readers or
text-browsers; it also fails to make me recommend the link on Twitter or
Facebook.

~~~
nickjj
They do.

I use Jekyll to build my site, which is served up with nginx. 2+ years and
100+ articles later and I think it was a great move. You tend to strive to
keep things fast and minimal, rather than bolt on a bunch of bloated plugins
and other things that detract from the reading experience.

------
jswizzy
Drudge is a pretty good case study in minimalistic design. By most metrics
it's ugly and even baroque but it's brilliant because it is easy to parse and
gets to the meat of the narrative that Matt is trying to sell to his audience.

~~~
kakarot
I've always been extremely impressed with Drudge's design.

It's quick, easy to maintain, and has been completely mobile optimized since
the flip-phone days.

It is built around showing you information, instead of information being an
excuse to show you ads. Matt understands what he is providing and that
insemination of information is more valuable than any extreme monetization
strategies.

It doesn't have a confusing landscape of sections, icon fonts, ad videos and
promotional content that prevent newcomers from understanding the flow. It
takes but a few clicks before you are intimate with the interface.

It is the quintessential "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"

I just wish there were more publications of this style that weren't hyper-
conservative and biased.

For another example of a beautifully designed site that puts information
first, look at Cryptome.

[https://cryptome.org/](https://cryptome.org/)

------
akras14
I wrote a simple RSS feed viewer for myself for the same reason. A lot of
times I just want to read the headlines from top news sites.

[https://www.alexkras.com/eznews/](https://www.alexkras.com/eznews/)

If I am actually interested in the story I don’t mind waiting a bit for it to
load.

~~~
nooyurrsdey
This is great! Any chance you have the source code for this handy somewhere?

Edit: Never mind, found it linked from your blog!

For anyone else looking:
[https://github.com/akras14/eznews/blob/master/index.php](https://github.com/akras14/eznews/blob/master/index.php)

Nice work!

~~~
akras14
Thanks,

Here is the blog post to go with it: Simple RSS Reader in 85 Lines of PHP -
[https://www.alexkras.com/simple-rss-reader-in-85-lines-of-
ph...](https://www.alexkras.com/simple-rss-reader-in-85-lines-of-php/)

------
gmu3
Hate it or love it the drudge report remains one of the most powerful sites on
the internet

------
wheresmyusern
there is a huge problem with browsers right now -- they are very complicated
and big and therefore their development is monopolized by three large
organizations, leading to browsers that dont adhere to the best interests of
the users. and yet, as this article demonstrates, much of the internet does
not require any of the complicated machinery in modern browsers.

we have seen our culture, the worlds culture, adopt computers and the
internet. gaming, social media, all kinds of media distributed over the
internet -- we have grown into the internet. and with this development, we are
fast approaching a platou, a period of maturity where it is clear what exactly
the internet is used for by most people in most cases, and also (critically)
how those uses are implemented. when the internet was born, we made browsers
with a turing complete language built in and we made all the tools very
general, all because we didnt know what was going to happen. we had to be
ready for anything. this is simply not true anymore.

off the cuff, the internet is used for reading forums, reading news, watching
video and listening to music. perhaps a new kind of browser can be adopted
that has those things baked in and nothing else. this kind of browser would
meet most of peoples needs while being simple enough to make competition
possible, thus aligning these new browsers with the interests of users. these
browsers would be much, much safer as well.

for other kind of websites, sophisticated web apps that allow you to interface
with a service, like email or time clocking or whatever, perhaps those things
could be branched off into a new area where js, wasm and binary distribution
live. perhaps a different class of browsers. with these kinds of browsers,
there is more pressure to align with users interests because users can soft-
boycott them because 90 percent of their needs are met by the simpler browsers
mentioned earlier.

and perhaps a new standard for interfacing with documents can be baked into
these new simpler browsers to further take necessity and power away from js
and wasm browsers. for things like emails, remote document manipulation,
assignment submissions, etc, a lot of that could be fit into a standard that
is baked into the browser instead of being re-implemented in js for every
instance.

a new class of simple browsers would create a new division of the internet
that is clean, fast, simple and worry free much like these text only news
sites.

if one could bake payment into the browser as well, creating the most
friction-less payment experience on the internet ever seen, we could see a re-
vitalization like that seen with patreon all over again.

~~~
shpx
[http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite](http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_\(protocol\))

~~~
peatmoss
I wonder how Gopher might be extended to offer micropayments.

If someone wanted to create a web-alternative for high singal to noise content
in 2017, I wonder if public libraries wouldn’t be the ideal test case.

------
stabbles
I created a text only version [https://noslite.nl](https://noslite.nl) for the
public news service in The Netherlands. It's 1000x smaller in size and
performs just 1 request per page.

------
vinspee
I’d also point out [https://tiny.ted.com/](https://tiny.ted.com/) \- a
(mostly) text version of TED. It defaults to the full transcript of talks.

------
taeric
I want this to be true. But I highly doubt it will stay. :( Would be really
neat to see numbers supporting that this is more than just a few fringe people
being served.

I've recently started using an RSS reader again and I'm finding that I can
find some feeds, but what I don't know where to find is a good place to
discuss the articles. More, it does feel like the feeds are a second class
citizen, at best. Is amusing to see the page that lists some feeds, such as
[https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fear-not-readers-we-
hav...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fear-not-readers-we-have-rss-
feeds/) still list the demise of google reader. Which, sadly, reminds me that
I haven't checked google+ is about as long.

------
gnicholas
For those interested in the accessibility side of news apps, I did a survey
[1] of many popular news apps and their text accessibility features.

The general trend was that news outlets generally offer some text
accessibility settings, and big tech company apps did not offer any text
settings at all.

My conjecture is that the minimalist design trend in Silicon Valley cuts
against having many user-configurable options, which unfortunately affects
accessibility.

1: [https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/the-importance-of-text-
acc...](https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/the-importance-of-text-
accessibility-in-news-apps-45ac8cca2e9a)

------
dredmorbius
This is a case of what I'm coming to call a Gresham's Mechanism, after
Gresham's Law.

The phenomena we see as Gresham's Law, which does _and always has_ exerted
itself far beyond coinage -- the first use is found in Aristophanes' "The
Frogs", in ancient Greece, referring to both coin and politicians, concerns a
_fitness_ or _reward_ mechanism, within some environment, specifically to
complexity or quality.

This can express itself as both a non-reward of higher quality, and of a
temporary seeking of greater complexity, depending on a number of factors (and
I'm still trying to sort out a description of how these may manifest).

In the instant case of Websites, chasing advertising dollars has rewarded more
complex, and paradoxically, less informational sites, which are expensive in
terms of the compute resources required to deliver them. There is a possible
inflection point at which simpler, lighter-weight alternatives can present
_both_ more and better information, _sufficient_ visual appeal (see my
comments and links elsehere in this thread), and at far less complexity.

This also shows up in various technologies and progressions, particularly as a
novel "worse-is-better" option emerges and overturns an established method or
product.

------
rawfael
Please, more websites like hacker news, wikipedia, techmeme, reddit, craiglist
and drudge report

------
rayiner
Click through some of the CNN or NPR links to an article. It’s a thing of
beauty.

~~~
tuxracer
For some reason they didn't link to the HTTPS versions:

[https://lite.cnn.io/en](https://lite.cnn.io/en)

[https://text.npr.org/](https://text.npr.org/)

------
wjdp
Minorly ironic the rest of the article about accessible text only content is
hidden behind a non-functional (for me, currently) 'Read More' button.

~~~
BenjiWiebe
Non-functional for me as well. :(

~~~
jwilk
Try the archived copy:

[https://archive.is/YtQ4b](https://archive.is/YtQ4b)

------
techaddict009
Off beat tip:

Also if you want to convert any existing website to light weight you can use
[https://googleweblight.com/?lite_url=<News](https://googleweblight.com/?lite_url=<News)
Article URL>

------
kevin_thibedeau
NoScript+images off turns many sites into low bandwidth text.

------
RandyRanderson
If only there were some really simple standard for text and rich media
syndication...

------
pseingatl
Meanwhile, AP has discontinued its text-only breaking news page.

------
kibrad
one of the main reasons is that people feel more comfortable accessing text
only sites at work

------
feelin_googley
The goal is to get the news with as little markup as possible.

Then use UNIX filters to transform it into the format one prefers.

For example, NYT has a jsonp feed I have posted before.

    
    
       # replace "world" with whatever NYT section you prefer
       curl -o 1.jsonp https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/world/index.jsonp   
    
        exec sed '/\"guid\" :/!d;s/\",//;s/.*\"//' 1.jsonp
    

Not every news site is the same of course. Using a list from journalism.org I
took a small sampling of other news sites to see if they had, at a minimum,
rss feeds. Most of them did but I stopped after about seven.

As an experiment to enjoy text-only versions of popular news websites, convert
the rss to html for a "text-only" version.

The author of radare2 wrote a filter called "rss2html" some years ago and it
works well enough for this experiment, so there is no work involved here.[1]
rss2html will transform a page of rss xml to html, txt, etc. Build it with
libcurl and it can fetch pages too.

    
    
        curl -o 1.xml http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/rss.xml
        rss2html 1.xml > 1.htm 
        browser file://1.htm
    

1\.
[http://web.archive.org/web/20140911194544/http://www.nopcode...](http://web.archive.org/web/20140911194544/http://www.nopcode.org/blog/rss2html.html)
(use cvs.nopcode.org mirror)

    
    
        http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/rss.xml
        http://feeds.reuters.com/Reuters/worldNews
        http://www.latimes.com/world/rss2.0.xml
        http://www.wsj.com/xml/rss/3_7085.xml
        http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/UsatodaycomWorld-TopStories
        http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/rss/world
    

I routinely write custom filters. Even if a news site has no rss feed it is
not difficult to produce csv or whatever format I need. However it is tedious.
A one-time cost.

------
mankash666
Just pitched a related idea to a friend, but since a "two sided marketplace"
is advised against for bootstrapped startups, have put it on the back burner.

Pitch: A "podcasts for textual content" optimized for low bandwidth.

An podcast like app that lets you subscribe to (textual content) creators,
auto downloads for offline reading, allows reviews on individual posts or
entire series, presents content in an ebook like aesthetic manner, and has the
lowest bandwidth for transmission and storage because: 1\. Transmission and
storage is in markdown (not HTML) 2\. Pretrained language models shall result
in higher compression ratios than regular gzip of HTML common in browsers.

Feedback appreciated

~~~
fivre
Congratulations on inventing the newspaper.

~~~
mankash666
And which newspaper allows you to read your neighbor's blog, your favorite
entrepreneurs deepest fears, and the news from South Africa, all preloaded per
your subscription choices? (Assuming this platform actually gathers steam).
It's not reinventing the newspaper, just like podcasts weren't like
reinventing the radio

~~~
matt4077
The RSS Times

------
nasredin
TLDR: to prevent DoS in case of natural and man made disasters: hurricanes,
terrorist attacks.

