Interesting. I've implemented naked CSS on my blog, which isn't quite the same:

https://theandrewbailey.com/x-naked

Very interesting

Honorable mention: https://text.npr.org/

Not technically plaintext (in the MIME type sense), but still very lightweight, especially when compared to other news sites.

In some web apps I code, I just serialize the view-model when the page is called with a ".json" or ".yaml" at the end. It forces you to be strict about not leaking private/complex data into the views and makes power-users' life much easier.

".txt" is also a good idea for content-heavy pages. Maybe ".md" too? I may try.

Offering a plain text version of your website may seem like a novel idea nowadays but I remember a time when pretty much every web page had a printer-friendly version with little to no formatting. I suppose printing web pages has become passé, that is unless you're printing a food recipe.

Thanks for putting together this list, it would be nice to add a short summary next to each link.

berkshirehathaway.com is a great text-only site, containing troves of buffett's letters with much wisdom. though the actual text mostly end up in pdf formats.

Also there is gemini (real, not google's stolen name thing) and gopher. Gemini renders great on Cell Phones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

What column width - don't tell me these plain text gurus use one long line per paragraph? Are Unicode emojis valid? What about a TUI using Unicode box drawing? Or ASCII characters? 7-bit ASCII only for the entire blog? Is there a way to handle input (a telnet connection?)?

We've hardly scratched the surface here.

(Now I want to make a TUI site.)

I didn't know about the .text extension for Daring Fireball: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/31/photoshop-1-and...

Interesting to see how the original creator of Markdown uses it.

I'm presuming that's the version he edits and not output automatically converted from an intermediary representation.

I think this site/list is more fitting: https://textonly.website/

Several years ago, I transitioned my Wordpress website to a static CSS/HTML only site, editing/updating it with vim and sftp https://chuck.is. Overall, it's been a fantastic learning experience doing everything manually (though I plan to automate more soon). I was inspired by http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/