
Ask HN: Why don't websites have 'text only' backup versions? - innovator116
I am a long time lurker here, though not a programmer, but a system admin and professional manager, open source enthusiast. A trend which I am seeing is that websites may use latest programming paradigms and designs to make them beautiful and stunning, yet they are so engrossed in javascript and &#x27;awesome&#x27; interactive graphics and images, that a website cannot be viewed without javascript and images disabled. To save bandwidth or during slow wireless speeds, it is desirable to run browser without javascript and images disabled but websites don&#x27;t have any kind of &#x27;text only&#x27; versions for such use. In an ideal situation, every website should have &#x27;text only&#x27; version which can be opened in CLI browser like Links. As an example, this startup http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qfusionlabs.com&#x2F; website looks like blowing a bubble without javascript and images disabled. 
Edit: I am glad that Hacker News works perfectly without javascript and images disabled! Why can&#x27;t all of discrete websites be like this.
======
chriswarbo
The "proper" approach to this is 'progressive enhancement', ie. that every
site is _already_ a text only version. Then, on top of that, you can add
images, stylesheets, Javascript, etc. as necessary. This used to work well,
since that was also the easiest approach to building a site (unless you used
Flash...)

I think frameworks have inverted things: the easiest approach these days is to
load the default config of some framework/CMS, which will make heavy use of
Javascript/images/CSS/etc. in order to entice developers to use it (otherwise,
why use a framework at all ;) ). In this world, _turning off_ a feature takes
more effort than leaving it on, and we end up with ideas like special "text
only" alternatives.

I think there's definitely a burden on the developers of frameworks to make
them degrade as gracefully as possible. Of course, this isn't always possible
(especially those designed to be completely in client-side JS), but in those
instances where it is possible, it can have a large impact. For example, if
the developer of some popular Wordpress theme spent a little extra effort on
graceful fallbacks, it would improve the situation for all sites using that
theme.

Disclaimer: I used to develop a CMS with crazy-strict adherence to, among
other things, accessibility standards ;)

~~~
edwhitesell
What CMS do you develop? This sounds like something I would use.

I always browse with cookies and Javascript disabled. There are very few sites
I'll enable one or both to use. Most of the time, the first time I browse a
site that requires Javascript to show anything useful I just leave. If you
can't make your pitch with text, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be
interested.

I know, I know...I'm not the typical market for those kinds of sites.

~~~
chriswarbo
I was a developer of [http://ocportal.com](http://ocportal.com) a few years
ago. I can't take much credit for it though, since my contribution was a drop
in the ocean compared to that of Chris Graham.

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
Well done. Seems to work reasonably well without JS, which is more than far
too many websites can say.

Well, except for the SWF animation at the top, and the dropdown menus, but
meh.

------
dsr_
It depends on your business model.

Model 1: ecommerce. The website exists to sell your product. Having an
alternate version is a simple cost/benefit decision: will people buy your
thing from a low-overhead site? This may be combined with a mobile-friendly
rendition.

Model 2: advertising. The website exists to catch attention long enough to
show ads. You need seven tracking systems and eleven ad networks; all of them
need JS and graphics and won't make money for you otherwise.

Model 3: public service. The focus is on providing information, not on making
a sale or showing ads. The benefit of a low-overhead version is clear, but you
need to keep the costs low, so you can't spend much extra time or money on it.

Model 4: SAAS. The website is the service, so user satisfaction is the top
concern. Understand how your users want to use your service, and provide that
for them.

------
untog
Because it isn't worth it, basically. It's a relatively simple economic
decision - making a text only backup version takes time, programming, adds an
extra possibility for failure, etc. etc. - and the people who want a text only
version are an extremely small minority.

I know that sounds a little heartless and "not caring about the web", but it's
the reality.

~~~
exelius
It depends on the site, but it's really not that much effort for any site that
a viewer would WANT a text-only mode.

Sites with lots of text content invariably use a CMS to manage that content.
It's not hard to build a text-only template, and in fact many sites actually
do this - if you browse on mobile Safari, it's called "Reader Mode". I don't
know if Android has an equivalent, but I would assume so.

~~~
hollerith
I think you've acquired a mistaken picture of Reader Mode. Reader Mode (like
the Readable and Readability bookmarklets) presents an alternative rendering
of the same set of files from which the standard view is rendered: it does not
cause the server to serve an alternative set of files.

Reader Mode and the Readable and Readability bookmarklets fail often even on
"text-centric" pages such as blog posts.

------
lmm
Because the business case isn't there, in terms of the cost/benefit. It's a
lot of work (maybe not initially, but maintaining that functionality on an
ongoing basis slows development), to support a tiny number of users, who you
can't make any money advertising to (if you're ad-supported) and who are
probably not the kind of users who buy much (if you sell directly).

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
The sad bit about this attitude is that some of us consider web
design/development to be a craft, rather than purely an exercise in profit-
maximisation. We should be creating the very best work that we can, not just
aiming for what's good enough, then stopping. That's just an opinion; I
realise it's unpopular with some.

~~~
netheril96
It is not unpopular. It is unrealistic.

------
lambdaelite
As someone who lives without constant broadband and as someone who works with
people who enjoy accessibility settings in software, I think the current web
design trend you describe is disastrous.

~~~
commentnull
It is an awful experience. Mobile data is often sketchy, but these bloated
sites don't render a single thing until all the twenty tons of front end crap
is downloaded, and all to view a tiny static chunk of text. But hey, they got
to use react, a metric shit ton of the latest CSS wankery, and it is connected
to every social meejia platform!

~~~
lambdaelite
Silently downloading updates in the background is another frustrating trend.
I've had data caps get blown not due to my actions, but due to updates.

I think good design should include designing for the those with impairments or
those who don't live in a big city with uncapped broadband.

------
methyl
I think main reason is that number of users with JS disabled these days is
just too small to care.

Another thing is even if the effort of enabling is small, people responsible
for the website are not even aware of the problem.

As an experiment I would drop a note to a few websites broken with JS disabled
about a problem, providing a reasoning why it should be fixed and check how
many respond.

~~~
tslug
I agree. The only people who disable JS are informed, and who wants those
kinds of people visiting their website?! Ha! Good riddance, I say!

------
snowwrestler
When are we going to get over the idea of turning off javascript? No one asks
"why doesn't my Java app run properly when I turn off the JVM?" I would argue
that the open web is getting to that point with javascript.

JS is an open standard, highly performant, and implemented well by almost
every single browser out there. The only people I know who regularly browse
without JS are old-timers who got into the habit 10 years ago, before
Spidermonkey, V8, Nitro, JavascriptCore etc. revolutionized performance, and
before AJAX revolutionized architectures.

Let me propose a different way of looking at things. The concerns you actually
expressed are performance, download size, and CLI browser compatibility.

Performance - I don't know of a reason that javascript apps cannot be
performant enough, even on low-bandwidth connections. AJAX was invented to
improve performance over static websites, by reducing network traffic to just
the bits that change with each user action.

Download size - Javascript obviously has nothing to do with how many images or
videos a site embeds.

CLI browser - Why can't the CLI browsers implement a javascript engine, and
then render the results, just like any other browser? There is nothing about
JS that requires a GUI.

edit- speling

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
Running through:

W.r.t. "old-timers who got into the habit 10 years ago". A decade ago I was
11. Not exactly an old-timer.

W.r.t. performance, in an ideal world, you'd be absolutely right. But this is
not an ideal world. There are far too many websites that are substantially
_less_ performant with JS. (Case in point: Gmail.). There are far too many
websites that kill my battery life on my laptop via sloppy coding. There are
far too many websites that don't stop downloading in the background to refresh
things that I don't need refreshed, and in the process kill my bandwidth cap
on my home connection. There are far too many websites that take multiple
seconds before they even begin to render, because they are waiting on some
library to load before they parse things clientside. Looking at you, client-
side markdown. There are far too many websites that are _less_ responsive on
the "responsive" version with JS than with the fallback without JS.

W.r.t. download size, again, in an ideal world, you'd be absolutely right. But
this is, again, not an ideal world. There are far too many websites that pull
down multiple MB of libraries before they even _start_ to load. Sometimes they
are cached, but far too often they aren't. There are far too many websites,
again, that refresh things that I don't need refreshed and as such continue to
use bandwidth.

And you're missing two other things: the two concerns that I consider most
important. One is security. The majority of browser exploits require JS,
especially the nastier ones. As you say, JS engines focus heavily on
performance. And trying to get high performance out of a JITted language goes
intrinsically against security. For a certain amount of dev time, you can get
decent security and decent performance, great performance and weak security,
or great security and weak performance. It's an intrinsic trade-off. (The
other one is user tracking, but I'm not going to get into that one here.)

And one other thing: with JS disabled, most of the time if a webpage is loaded
it's actually loaded. I can keep it up and sit in a bus or something and read
it, without an internet connection. With JS enabled, far too many websites end
up breaking nastily some time down the line when they go to update something
and fail. Again: not an intrinsic, but something far too many websites do
anyways.

------
falcolas
From a dead user, Diti, whose sentiments match my own:

> To me, any website implementing good accessibility
> ([http://www.w3.org/WAI/](http://www.w3.org/WAI/)) is likely to be perfectly
> viewable and browsable per what you said. But most webmasters don't know
> about WAI.

I'd add "or don't care".

------
brudgers
It's cheaper to make a fancy box around a pinecone than to deliver a Fabrege
egg. Content that stands on its own is harder than a flock of spinning
googaws. That's why Facebook fills your feed with CandyCrush.

------
vanderZwan
This reminds me of the rarely-used print stylesheet[0]. In fact, the only
place I've ever seen it in use is on websites run by the Dutch government
(perhaps other governments do so too, but I've never needed to check them
out).

EDIT: A bit of online searching mainly shows people *complaining8 about print
sheets, so perhaps I'm completely out of the loop and simply haven't printed
anything in a long time.

It's not much - just stripping out menu bars and other stuff that makes no
sense in print, plus a few typographical changes, such as a change in font
from sans serif (screen) to serif (paper).

Similar to the other comment, there isn't a clear business case for it very
often, but whenever there's a website with a "print version"-link to their
articles I don't see why they wouldn't do this instead. Well, aside from the
fact that nobody would expect this functionality to be there, which isn't
minor I guess.

[0]
[http://alistapart.com/article/goingtoprint](http://alistapart.com/article/goingtoprint)

~~~
a3n
Among my small circle that used to be the habit when sharing links, share the
print link. News sites used to have it a lot, but I don't see it so much
anymore.

~~~
bryanlarsen
print links generally don't use the print media css. Usage of print media css
means the site prints something different than is what is seen on the screen.

------
thomasfoster96
The lazy answer is that >95% of users have images and JavaScript enabled, and
of that 95%, those who have a slow connection are getting the same experience
across a number of websites, so they probably won't be turned off by a slow
site.

The better answer is that unless you think about it from the start, providing
a no-JS fallback can be hard to do well and may require a fair bit of re-
architecturing of your website or web app - something that you probably won't
bother doing to do for a single digit percentage of your visitors (text-only
support probably has a lower priority than supporting <IE9 and Opera Mini).
Finding out that images won't work is also pretty hard - they're no way that I
know of finding out if images are enabled or not without using JavaScript,
which is probably disabled as well.

I've actually been creating a reasonably complex web-based application
recently, and for fun every few weeks I test it using Lynx[0]. Technically,
using forms and very basic CSS results in a fairly usable service. I managed
to get a working CSS3-only (no JS) fallback for tabs, some toggle buttons and
some other UI goodies. The only problem is that I end up duplicating a lot of
stuff on the backend of the app (because I have to deal with both form
submissions AND ajax), and there are a lot of things that you can only really
do with JavaScript and images (e.g. games, most interactive stuff without
reloads, anything to do with images obviously).

EDIT: regarding advertising, rarely do (effective) advertisers online want the
_largest_ audience specifically, they want the most engaged audience. Is this
no-JS and no-images user interested in downloading an app or a pop album?
Probably not, so it's not worth putting in the effort to make them see your
ads.

[0] [http://lynx.isc.org/](http://lynx.isc.org/)

------
shawnfratis
To me, it seems almost as if the web dev is saying "if you don't have the
latest, most up-to-date, most powerful device/whatever, then we don't want you
looking at our ads". Seriously? I thought the idea of advertising was to get
as many eyeballs as possible. That way of thinking seems so counter-productive
to me, plus I can't imagine the advertiser being very happy with that
approach. Thinking back to my days working in recording studios, we always
mixed stuff in a way that it would sound good on both a giant audio system or
a small, cheesy boom-box, with the idea that we wanted everyone who listens to
have a good experience no matter what system they were using. I'm not quite
sure why this methodology can't be applied here.

~~~
Siecje
That's not the case when supporting IE < 10.

------
gremlinsinc
Some do, it's called an RSS Feed.

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
Far too often lately I've been seeing "RSS feeds" that are nothing but the
title and a link to the webpage.

------
paulojreis
If you are a manager, then you will surely understand.

It's mostly because the website owner/responsible believes that the cost of
producing a "text only" version would be bigger than the benefits achieved. If
the decision is right or not, I wouldn't know - and, frankly, neither most of
people who make the decision (albeit being "confident"). I seriously doubt
that any thorough analysis is done on the subject, people just believe that
almost everyone uses JS and images. And they might be right, or not.

Sometimes it might also be a matter of ignorance. It might happen that the
responsible is not aware of this question (and neither is "made aware" by the
technical people).

------
matthewmacleod
Yes, this very much annoys me.

It's not text-only versions we need, but sensible use of progressive
enhancement. I'm totally fine with 'web apps' requiring Javascript and CSS
(but please, at least give me a message to that effect, and don't leave me
with an infinite spinner!) but simple web pages are increasingly broken
without scripting.

It's frustrating, because it's not like progressive enhancement is hard,
either.

------
leap_ahead
It basically amounts to two alternatives:

1) they make it intentional for whatever purpose - stop scrappers, prevent
search engine indexing, pull in ads etc.

2) they make it out of incompetence - probably somebody with insufficient web
development skills just used some popular JavaScript framework to quickly cook
up a site

Now the majority of the customers won't care, but if you're targeting a
professional audience, this will not score you any points. If you were a
software development company hiring and I were to reply to your invitation, I
would first go to your website. If I saw a blank screen in my browser, my
first question to you would be why a serious company does have a broken site.
Depending on what I heard I might skip you altogether.

Personally, I don't think there are any difficulties in doing a "text-only"
version as you call it. That's how I always approach things - do a classic
version then add some gradual enhancements. I can't imagine doing it the other
way around actually.

And yes, you can call me out of touch with the times, but text pages rank
higher and more credible in my eyes then all of the JavaScript toys I see
around.

------
vilmosi
>>> every website should have 'text only' version which can be opened in CLI
browser like Links.

every website has a target audience and it simply doesn't make sense to spend
time and effort for this support. It's just not worth it.

------
qjighap
(Playing devil's advocate marketing guy) Why would I allow you to see my
product being website, web-based service or simply my advertising without the
full experience? If I offer options to see a stripped down version then I am
creating a consumer that will talk about the stripped down version and it will
taint my brand. If you were to go to my site then when people ask you about it
then I want you to tell them that your actions gave a non-optimal experience.
(Non-optimal being my opinion of what I think you as a customer should be and
not you a reasonable person should be)

~~~
gambiter
SEO is my first thought. Have you ever tried to write a web spider from
scratch? The various ways that websites are built can make scraping meaningful
data VERY difficult. I recall one particular site that didn't even store the
price for an item in the same parent container, so there was nothing (from a
markup standpoint) that linked the product and its price... you HAD to view it
with JS enabled.

I think down deep, the author is looking for the web to go back to the
[http://www.csszengarden.com](http://www.csszengarden.com) days. I really wish
web designers would put forth the effort.

------
peterwwillis
To answer that, you have to ask yourself why somebody would not want to create
an abstraction between content and presentation for their website. It's a
basic aspect of modern web design, and even when it gets implemented, it's
only ever used to present in one way. Why would someone do that? I'm sure
there are a multitude of answers, the most basic of which is "they didn't feel
like it." They probably didn't feel like it because they didn't think their
efforts would be rewarded, or it wasn't personally fulfilling to them.

------
jessaustin
It used to be an SEO technique, to make sure that the important parts of a
page rendered without javascript. I think the Google is now running javascript
in its spider, so that is less of a factor now.

~~~
leni536
Well that Google can index non-gracefully degrading sites is ok. How Google
wants to rank these sites is an other interesting question.

------
theaccordance
What you're describing sounds like an edge case and goes against the design &
development methodologies used in today's websites. Rarely are we building
things with static content, and we're leveraging the power of AJAX to minimize
the number of times a browser must refresh the entire window to load new
content.

Current trends aside, from a pragmatic perspective, I would anticipate
something like this increasing development costs (labor & money) between
10-50%, and would likely have a very low ROI.

~~~
matthewmacleod
Completely disagree with this.

\- Most sites contain static content and are not interactive. Things like
simple forms don't really count, in my opinion. \- Sites which load static
content are in my experience slower as a result of using AJAX, not faster

In fact, I'd argue that there is essentially no additional cost in building a
site that uses progressive enhancement for loading content. If anything, my
experience is it encourages a much more sensible architecture.

Of course, the value proposition changes when we're looking at interactive web
apps, and I agree it's not clear that there's value there.

------
aikah
> Why can't all of discrete websites be like this.

Because most people never turn javascript off OR use links to browser the web.

Of course javascript-less websites have many advantages: easier end to end
testing, speed of execution, loading speed,work on a wider range of browsers
without hacks...

------
amelius
I guess that it is too much work, and perhaps because of ads. However, I
believe there should be a project for a server that does a url screengrab and
runs it through some scanning and OCR and perhaps some AI, that accomplishes
what you are asking.

(Any takers?)

~~~
untog
Readability already parses web sites to provide a simple reader view:

[https://readability.com/](https://readability.com/)

~~~
acqq
It doesn't do "just visit our page, enter the URL and you can read the other
site without having the javascript on, and even if the original style sheets
are wrong. Oh and we'll serve you some of our non-interactive adds."

Thinking about it, I would be ready to use such a site for the "unreadable"
sites.

------
acqq
Not the answer to the question, but that particular site is somewhat (a little
of the text and one or two images) readable without the JavaScript if you turn
the styles off.

I've just tried it with JS, actually it's a very little of the whole content.

~~~
jimktrains2
But then you have sites like Google Groups and some Blogger sites (though
GMail used to work in lynx, though I haven't tried it recently).

~~~
acqq
Yes, Blogger and Google Groups are really annoying.

GMail still has a special "basic HTML" version. It behaves much better over
the bandwidth limited or very remote connections. Even at my home, with
otherwise high speed internet, as I had some transient transmission problems
the "full" version wasn't usable, but HTML one worked.

At least GMail has the real "html-backup version" the OP asked for.

------
wmil
That's not the way to help people with low bandwith or very high latency
connections. They need more javascript, not less.

SPA designs can actually make CRUD apps significantly more useable on slow or
unreliable connections.

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
[Citation needed]

I've run across _far_ too many "mobile-friendly" websites that start by
loading many MBs of JS libraries. And just flat-out fail to load if any of
said libraries fail to load.

~~~
wmil
I'm talking about bad connections, not necessarily mobile. This applies
especially to situations that companies like G-Advetures face. In South
America they have to deal with perfectly fine desktops, but very high latency
internet connections. Submitting a form can take 20 minutes or more.

A text only version like the one described would be far worse than a JS heavy
one. JS free forms are naturally synchronous. So each edit would kill the ui
for a full refresh cycle.

On the other hand a SPA type page can send data in the background white you're
doing other work in the app.

Sure there are crappy mobile friendly sites, but that doesn't invalidate the
idea.

On a side note I'm not really sold on the whole CDN idea, it just looks like
another HTTP request and another point of failure. Concatenate / uglify seems
like the better solution.

------
frik
Older Opera browser versions (and Firefox/Chrome with plugins) allow you to
deactivate CSS. Then you see the website as you want it.

~~~
Steuard
That's still a built-in Firefox feature: View->Page Style->No Style. The same
menu will also let you choose between different "alternate style sheets" for
the same site. (I think it may even be sticky, per-page or per-site.) Just for
example, you could try it out here:
[http://www.slimy.com/~steuard/teaching/tutorials/Lagrange.ht...](http://www.slimy.com/~steuard/teaching/tutorials/Lagrange.html)

------
ialex
Sites need to show ads to get some more money, not all of them but...

------
ExpiredLink
> _I am ... not a programmer_

which is obvious from your question ;)

~~~
commentnull
So, the end user of the site has no say? They should be thankful they are even
allowed to cast their eyes on such a technical masterpiece? Developer or not,
people can spot a worrying trend of website "developers" who cannot develop -
they just bolt bits and frameworks together without a consideration for the
end users.

------
commentnull
Because the modern "developers" don't know how to do so. They barely manage to
bolt together a backend that scaffolded everything magically for them, to
react, less, and other "magic" they followed pavlovian style from blog
postings.

