
Text-only NPR - thecosas
https://text.npr.org/
======
thanatos_dem
132ms to load the whole page for me. Over half that time (76ms) spent
establishing the connection and negotiating TLS. TTFB only 18 milliseconds
once the connection was established. No adds, no pop ups, fully accessible,
cache friendly, and virtually free to host and maintain.

For a public news organization that doesn't need to desperately push their
brand onto people or track a user's every breath, this is a great thing to
provide, even if most people would consider it "ugly".

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gorbot
Lite sites are just the best. Hacker news, cnn, this, hell even Drudge Report.
It’s user friendly. It’s classic. It’s fast. Even with limited ads it’s just a
frustration free way to consume info

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smadge
First, I think there should be a browser extension that rewrites links for
various new sites from the bloated pages to these simple pages.

Second, I think it is ironic that one of the major justifications for
javascript on web pages is that itcan be used to optimize the page. For
example, javascript can be used to reduce the need for a full page reload,
reduce roundtrips when interacting with the page, only update the parts of the
page that actually change, etc. [Edit: I think a good example of this is
Hacker News itself, where upvotes initiate a full page reload if javascript is
disabled, but simple send an asynchronous request and update the page
otherwise.] This justification is trading off additional complexity and
violation of the simple application model provided by html and the related
concept of Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State (HATEOAS) where
clients are dumb and simple allow users to follow links and submit forms in a
standardized way, for micro optimizations. However, these micro-optimizations
are basically nullified by the hundreds of kilobytes of tracking software and
visual gizmos that content providers are stuffing in their pages, and the ever
increasing internet speeds and bandwidth. Make web pages dumb (and fast)
again!

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threatofrain
Similarly: [http://lite.cnn.io/en](http://lite.cnn.io/en)

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geoalchimista
The text-only website is just perfect to read in the CLI environment using
lynx. No ads, no distractions, just the contents. Definitely underrated.

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qqii
The only problem I've found is that if you reject cookies form their main site
it boots you to this homepage instead of whatever article you were on.

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dspillett
This is irritating for anything not in the current top articles, as the plain
site has no search or useful index of older entries, but you can manually work
around it.

copy the article ID from the "full" URL, the large integer after the date, and
place it at the end of
[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=)

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adjagu
There is a similar site for TED Talks too.

[https://en.tiny.ted.com/talks](https://en.tiny.ted.com/talks)

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crtasm
It's great. I wish when you choose text-only after clicking a link to NPR it
took you to the desired page instead of the homepage.

