Text is fed into my brain and then my brain needs to generate the image related to the text so in the end it’s all images anyway.
A text based webpage just causes me to do more work and even then the image in my mind could be wildly inaccurate.
Videos that contrast as he narrating the beauty of text based pages with examples of the contrary and a panning camera.
For this:
>You can paste the whole thing into an email to a friend. You can put it in ChatGPT to ask questions.
>Hell—you can post the whole thing on X and pretend you wrote it!
I'd like to see flashcuts of a person in front of the computer actually doing it while he narrates it. With cool music.
That style. Because this is what my brain is producing in my head if he doesn't.
I'm optimistic we'll soon see some AI startup provide proper solutions to these issues. But until then I prefer text.
Besides, flash-cuts of people acting out narration with music offer me nothing. A video like that is functionally just audio—a great candidate for playing in the background, in another tab, while I do something else.
#111111 is pretty close to black.
According to https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/, the contrast is 18.88:1 and easily passes all of the accessibility tests.
I had my browser/OS in light mode, so the contrast was excellent, but I tried dark mode just to see what would happen, and it was... not excellent.
The page has a @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) style that causes this, so those in light mode are unaffected.
This particular website isn't bad. If the grey were just a bit lighter, it would be.
When you are old enough you see this phenomenon everywhere. My reply here might even be an example of it!
I think it is, but I didn't realize it until you pointed it out ;)
IMO a nice serif font is ideal for long form content though. I remember reading the serifs help guide ones eyes into the next character and create more unique shapes than sans or monospace.
It's the same for mono vs proportional spacing. You are better at reading that which you have the most practice with. Most people are not used to reading monospaced prose even if they have seen a lot of monospaced code.
I've noticed that too - I read code all day, but there's something very odd about having conversations (prose) with Claude Code via a terminal window.
The capability is nice to have—for example, if your website is a coding tutorial website, and you have interspersed code examples and prose, put the code examples in a fixed width font. But it is over-used. For example, why do sites pick serif vs non-serif? Leave it up to my browser.
This isn’t just superficial, some people might use certain fonts that are easier to read for dyslexia, and I don’t think I should make their life artificially harder if it’s trivial for me to simply send a message as plain text.
As for accessibility, the people who need that have already set up the required font overrides and other stuff so it doesn't really benefit them much to use plaintext.
It's sad to think about how things could have been, but that's not the world we live in now...
Also I like using text because it shows I’m not hiding any kind of tracking images or anything like that.
Personally, I quite like the site's design and its font. My gripe often is light gray text on a darker gray background. The bad readability that so many newer sites seem to prefer makes me question my eyes or my monitor capabilities. Reader mode in Firefox is also often very helpful.
But, the feature is overused, IMO. Anything can be used to express a bit of personality, but I do think it is sometimes specified in cases where it really isn’t.
That said, I'd probably just stick to "sans-serif" and let the browser/os preference hold. It's likely a helvetica/arial alike anyway and can be set by user preference if really wanted.
I did some professional services work years ago, very early in my career for a public-sector client that wanted accessibility features given absolute care and attention.
It really gave me some perspective and I've tried to be conscious of it ever since; though I'm purely back-end nowadays so it doesn't apply as much.
What's fun is making an app that explicitly requires well sightedness (scanned documents), and meeting accessibility requirements for literally everything in the app beyond that.
Aside: I wouldn't mind seeing a library where you can give a text weight and text color, with the background color you want to use, but it returns the closest background color that will meet accessibility/contrast requirements.
Another well known one and particularly interesting since it's one of the most valuable companies in the world and this is their real website and not something they've just kept for historical purposes or something. https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
I would pay good money to watch a clear-glasses-framed youngster pitch Buffet on turning the BH website into a progressive web app.
Lots of examples here (although many do have some amount of styling): https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html
It is a very nice quick goto when some friends start talking sports and I can pretend I care :)
My favorite sites are:
https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html
Plus gopher and gemini :)
Thanks
gopher://magical.fish
gopher://sdf.org
How about pitching an hour of work to make it easy to read on mobile? Not that I think BH cares, but in this day and age making it layout nicely on mobile is the least you can do and isn’t particularly difficult anymore.
http://stallman.org/ is another one. Though that's more likely because your mobile device is full of non-free badware or something so why encourage it.
They already have ads on their landing page for the same thing. That extra message comes across like a used car salesman. He could have phrased it to be informative but in a somewhat more impartial writing style.
The only thing funnier than this complaint is the thread on Quora criticizing this site, with the top post specifically demeaning the site's lack of a "back-end", postulating that manually updating half a dozen text-only HTML pages in MS Word poses an unreasonable burden to the site operators.
I assume a CMS, complicated database, and mountains of JavaScript would have been a more effective choice. But what do I know? Plain HTML isn't subject to the revolving door of application vulnerabilities so where is the fun in that?
>I estimate that about 40% of all auto drivers in the country can save money by insuring with GEICO. The figure is not 100% because insurers differ in their underwriting judgments, with some favoring drivers who live in certain geographical areas and work in certain occupations more than GEICO does. I believe, however, that GEICO more frequently offers the low price than does any other national carrier selling insurance to all comers. You can quickly find out whether you can save money by going to www.geico.com or by calling 800-555-2756.
And it is the Berkshire Hathaway website. Pitching their services seems like something you would expect.
I think it looks great on mobile. It's fast as shit and I'm still just a 2 clicks away from an annual report. Frankly I often prefer the desktop layout even on mobile.
Seeing "<font size=..." makes me wince a bit, but it sure is refreshing to see something like this in the current year. (Also, is the Geico ad hard-coded?)
I load text.npr.org (and lite.cnn.com) several times a day. They both load in times well below the realm of remarkable.
Just timed them:
- text.npr.org 89/96/109 ms
- lite.cnn.com 56/72/133 msAny details on how it works anywhere?
Also noticed this site from your personal site: https://biztoc.com/
I love the information density. By no means a text only site but I think it hits some of the same vibes.
EDIT: lite mode of biztoc in-line with the text only theme: https://biztoc.com/light
When I get presented with one of these I often just click out of the website.
If you're looking to spread information, make it easy by just delivering it to me unobstructed. Your GDPR bullshit doesn't apply to me anyway, I'm not in the EU.
I'm sorry but your page is a prime example of web enshittification. It's the kind of site I immediately move on from.
Part of the joy of having a personal website that nobody reads is that it can act as a playground, and the design is part of that.
There’s actually a network protocol separate from the web with a small but growing user base. It uses a Markdown inspired format called Gemtext, has no cookies or trackers, and avoids most of the usual bloat seen in 2025. It’s called the Gemini protocol. It’s not perfect from the perspective of protocol design (which some people on HN can’t seem to get over), but it works, it has real users, and you can try it today.
See Single Serving Sites as an example: https://singleservingsites.cool/
It kind of undermines the argument, and instead insists that the site looking like just a page of text is the important aspect.
Must be a generational thing :)
The real problem that I've noticed in most cases comes from excessive JS. If you don't use JS, then you can't do tracking banner, since you can't track, can't really do ads, and video autoplay via the video tag is already disabled in browsers, so you can't do that either. With no JS, it's functionally impossible to do most of the things the ad-pilled marketers want to do with a website that makes it so horrible for the rest of us.
JS can be used in moderation too, but it opens the door to temptation, and the road from there to slow load times even on good connections is awfully short it seems.
You can still track (though not as efficiently). E.g. cookies are an HTTP header, not something JS sets.
GDPR aka "do not track/collect unnecessary data without consent" still applies regardless of whether your site is text only or not.
In the author's own words:
> “So thank you to everybody who writes and publishes text-only webpages.”
> “So thank you to everybody who writes and publishes text-only webpages.”
The site is 100% text.
Remember all those nonsense Flash intros sites used to have? For whatever reason restaurants were the worst at this (probably because consultants building these sites impressed the owner with “fancy stuff”). They were horrible… like just show me your friggin menu and don’t make we watch a 30 second nonsense intro to your website.
The modern version of that are these horrible single page templates that everyone uses where you just keep scrolling and scrolling and the “menu” is just taking you to different parts of this scroll-o-rama nonsense. I’ll take basic with good content over fancy design all day long.
The div soups you see on sites like Facebook are obviously another story :)
But it has to be separate from writing. I'd say the benefit of monospace fonts is that it is easier and faster to type and more or less typeset at the same time.
The issue is that I do use pictures occasionally in my posts, and these aren’t just flavor, it’ll be graphs and screenshots and stuff. I also do use Javascript purely for the client-side search [1] and going hyper-minimal kind of means a rejection of JavaScript. Search isn’t strictly “necessary” but kind of nice.
And that’s the recurring theme I keep finding; 99% of stuff can easily be converted to a dumb and fast text-only thing, but then there’s that one thing that makes me keep stuff bloated.
If I do it client-side then that makes my job a fair bit easier; I don’t need to handle any kind of complicated server logic, I don’t need to mess around with databases, I really don’t need to program at all, and if I am going to manage a blog I fundamentally want it to be about writing. Otherwise all my time goes to fucking around with configurations or figuring out why a database has crashed.
Also I hate Django and Rails and PHP and absolutely will not touch any of them unless someone is paying me. I know there are other options out there though.
The template I have still uses CSS but it’s not a ton of CSS. Probably the most problematic thing I do with it is load a custom TTF font.
I can reformat webpages into formatted text exactly the way I want it; I can save the important bits into an SQL database (I like the text-only output of sqlite3)
I do not use a popular, so-called "modern" browser; no graphics, no automatic sourcing of resources (files), no css, no javascript
I cannot understand why HN commenters believe that text-only is up to the web developer (whereupon the web user must look for aesthetcially-pleasing websites)
Text-only is up to the web user; all webpages look more or less the same to me; it's just text
Why use a graphical browser to view text
If you can come up with reasons, then either (a) you are a web developer or (b) you will be a target for online ads, whether you like them or not^1
1. And you will spend a gross amount of time and energy trying to "block" them
Please don't misunderstand me; sometimes one needs graphics, fonts, etc.^2; but that decision is up to the web user, not the web developer
tl;dr the decision to consume information published on the web as text-only is up to the web user, not the web developer
1. Such occasions might call for using a so-called "modern" browser, with graphics, Javascript and so on. For example, making airline reservations using a website. However, this does not preclude one from consuming website information as text-only, e.g., in the process of searching for fares. This decision is for the web user, not the web developer. Different web users may make different decisions.
Perhaps that's one reason why I spend so much time on HN
"95% of the time", I am a text-mode command line user, no graphics layer (note difference between "text-mode" and "terminal"; I'm not using the later)
I make choices in software based on what I think works well for command line use and what fits own aesthetic preferences
TBH I have no idea what are other peoples' preferred aesthetics, I only know mine
Currently,
I submit/reply/edit on HN using tiny shell scripts, no browser (TCP client to send the HTTP, custom text-processing filter to format the request body)
I search HN using a local SQLite database and a shell one-liner
I read HN using links (modified with some personal changes)
In the past I have stated that I use links as an "HTML reader"; I do not necessarily use links to make HTTP requests nor do I necessarily consume all webpage content as HTML; mostly I am using links to read HTML offline, e.g., an HTML file saved to a tmpfs directory
The point I'm trying to make when I mention I'm not using a popular browser is that, according to the design of the www, www users (e.g., me) get to choose the software, not web developers or website operators
As such, I would not expect any other www users to necessarily use the same software; nor would I expect any www user to care about any other www user's personal preferences, particularly mine; others could have different expectations
Each www user can choose whatever software they want, including software that isn't popular
When I mention I'm not using a popular browser, I sometimes get these "what browser are you using" comments
I'm not inclined to answer because I think it distracts from the point I am trying to make; it's a tangent, a red herring
I wish the question was something like "how do you view [example.com]", where example.com is some website the commenter visits that causes them to believe popular web browsers are required for _every_ website
Chances are, I do not visit the same website; every www user is different
But if I knew what this website was, then perhaps I could demonstrate how I might extract the information I wanted from it and read it as a text file
I don't spend that much time on HN hence the delay in replying.
> "I'm not inclined to answer because I think it distracts from the point I am trying to make; it's a tangent, a red herring"
I sort of guessed that you were not using a 'standard' Web browser (tui or gui) which is why I became interested. At least you now have a text that you can post a link to next time someone becomes insistent about this.
Exactly right, that's the idea
HN commenters sometimes ask for "a writeup"
I think it's interesting that you use links and consider it venerable
It's also very difficult to delegate since they'll want some cybersecurity theatre "verifciation" that requires multiple devices, cursed mobile apps, and "selfies".
I don't see any way around this apart from not taking flights, or paying a lot more for these privileges.
But someone else might see ways around it; not every www user is the same
For example, it's possible to use a popular browser for banking and purchasing tickets while using some other program(s) for reading and commenting on HN
If one only ever uses the internet for banking and purchasing tickets, and refrains from any noncommercial use, e.g., reading HN submissions and commenting on them, then a popular web browser might be all one ever needs
But how many websites submitted to HN require "cybersecurity theatre "verification" that requires multiple devices, cursed mobile apps, and "selfies""
Other www users might only spend a relatively small amount of their internet usage making purchases
Not every www user is the same, nor is every website on the internet the same
"... lest the site explode."
I use a setup that differs from web developers and I have never seen a website "explode"; this includes commercial websites
Like the OP suggests, it's just text
> But over the past ~30 years, the internet has become much more commercial. Every page is optimized for engagement, so your attention can be resold to ad companies. It just kinda sucks.
later in the same page
> I'm the Head of Marketing for Buzzsprout, a podcast SaaS built on RSS.
And https://www.buzzsprout.com/ads is exactly what you'd expect. The author has no trouble working and getting paid for the same thing they lament.
Perhaps the author is in a similar situation?
It is the holier than thou ("Look how bad things are. tsk tsk") that I cant stand.
The message would have been much better if was like "We live in this economy, and wouldnt it be nice if we could .. oh and by the way, I am part of the problem and here's what I'm doing about it."
The article is no different than a drug dealer saying "the drug problem in this country is out of control.
[1]: People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones
> But over the past ~30 years, the internet has become much more commercial.
You work for a company doing podcasts, distributed over internet, which lets creators make money. It is the definition of commercial.
> Every page is optimized for engagement, so your attention can be resold to ad companies.
You can rewrite that "page" with "content", and then how different is your podcast? "Every content (podcast) is optimized for engagement, so your attention can be resold to ad companies".
> We can tell you which podcasts accepted the ads
How do you know which podcasts accepted ads? Yes, by tracking. To be honest, it isnt a bad word at all - but you made it to be a bad word, and I'm pointing that out.
EDIT: Your company uses GTM, which I'm sure you look at as the Head of Marketing.
1. Monospace which helps with formatting
2. Availability: I don’t think there are a whole lot of built-in monospace fonts
And there are a few options for system fonts: https://iainbean.com/posts/2021/system-fonts-dont-have-to-be...
Boom, you got yourself a text-mostly website with no monospace: https://dmitriid.com/hypermedia-is-a-property-of-the-client (with an option for images of course https://dmitriid.com/romania-2023)
I provide additional features for users, one is TTS so that they can listen to the article. Another feature is a little icon that appears for links that are external to the website.
I have recently come around to the idea of adding a banner image, as a way of tone setting for the text to come.
Could you expand further on why you propose this?
You can even consume it over SSH: "ssh teletekst.nl"
My platform of choice is Mataroa (https://mataroa.blog), and I love their simpler approach.
If you want to go even more minimal, there's https://smol.pub and https://prose.sh.
Missed pun opportunity
So, instead of bearing possible bear induced pain, I slept soundly after a pint of beer.
Plus, I'm still in one piece, so at least I can consider this a win.
Scrolling down to the bottom of your page I clicked through to https://bearblog.dev/ and explored some of the pages there.
Speaking of bugs: the Unicode-art at the bottom of the mentioned page isn't showing correctly.
No single web font can display all Unicode code-points, and using a suitable font for that Unicode-art would fix it.
More on that here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/...
Free hosting, censorship resistance, minimal styling blah blah blah. What's not to like?
You can paste the whole thing into an email to a friend. You can put it in ChatGPT to ask questions.
Hell-you can post the whole thing on X and pretend you wrote it!
You can read it right there, or you can send it to Kindle, save it to Matter, or print it on real-life paper.
It's going to work everywhere because it's just text."
Many years ago before "Wikipedia over DNS" but after "42 ways to distribute DeCSS"^1, I served tiny webpages in DNS TXT RRs from tinydns and modified dnstxt to print a HTTP header above the HTML
Today DNS data is being served via HTTPS: an HTTP header followed by a DNS RR, which could be a TXT RR, which theoretically could contain HTML
Distributed as text
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Oh man. This kind of blew up.
Here are my links, since we seem to be sharing our favourite
"small web" resources.
1. NO-HTML (text only) club.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43193383
I admire the aesthetic, but I'm too addicted to links to
say "no html." Though yeah, I guess you can't have a
BLINK tag if you can't have HTML.
2. org-social, like tweets over RSS, but inside emacs
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44889354
I use emacs. I like lisp. I'm one of //those// weirdos.
This is sort of like sending tweets into the void via
RSS, but in org-mode syntax so you never have to leave
emacs.
3. 1kb club - a site for pages that are less than 1kb
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35463629
Seems more like an excuse to put a bunch of ASCII art on
a page, but sure... good art sometimes comes from
embracing limitations. But then again, sometimes that
makes bad art. YMMV.
4. "Bobcat" -- a list of useful, small web pages
HTTPS://BI6.US/CO/BO.HTML
This is my small web page where I point to other small
web pages, but I try to send it with a "does this look
useful to a general audience" filter.
5. The Bit-Roast Nano-Blog
HTTPS://BI6.US/CO/N/
I called this a "nano-blog" not because each post was
very small, but because I implemented it with not very much
javascript (running on a dev machine to produce static
content.)
Hmm. I think the OP's page and the comments and up-votes
indicates there's a community of people who are hip to simple
sites that aren't overloaded with //stuff//. I don't know if
there's a market for web pages that fit on a single phone
screen and be mostly text, but it would be fun. (Oh wait...
did I just describe WAP/WML?)
/etc /etc
BugsJustFindMe•5mo ago
Hosting images is cheap too. GitHub will even do it for free!
kaycebasques•5mo ago
datadrivenangel•5mo ago
guizadillas•5mo ago
meken•5mo ago
BugsJustFindMe•5mo ago