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Comment by mhink | Hacker News Reader

With regards to the "usually a news site" part, somebody put me onto CNN's "lite" page the other day, and it's honestly a freaking joy to use.

http://lite.cnn.com/en

On the other hand, I think there's definitely a case to be made for rich, application-like presentation of content, when it enhances the delivery of information. For instance:

http://www.r2d3.us/visual-intro-to-machine-learning-part-1/

The problem is that everyone dreams of making something cool like the latter, when their actual content is much closer to the former.

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>somebody put me onto CNN's "lite" page the other day, and it's honestly a freaking joy to use.

That's neat, but I think having this with some lightweight, web-optimized static images would make this better without being detrimental to lightness.

Sometimes a picture does say a thousand words. A photograph of a person being interviewed is something that adds a lot to an article. Plus there's the whole photojournalism aspect that's lost in only keeping text.

It's not the images, per se, that make heavy pages heavy, after all. It's tons of JS that pulls in FSM knows what.

A few images and some tasteful CSS could turn the light page into something fairly respectable looking.

Consider e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/19990208015258/http://www.nytime...

a photograph of a person being interviewed is something that adds a lot to an article.

Does it? It seems that it ought to add nothing to the content - unless the content specifically references their appearance.

As well as that, unless it's a person you can google independently (like a head of state, or large company CEO) there's very little chance you can know whether the image is actually the person being interviewed, and even less chance you can tell whether it was /this/ interview. What you do know is that the image will have been posed, chosen from a lot of candidate images, and quite likely edited after that.

It might feel good to recognise and see a human face, and therefore "add a lot" from the publisher side - exploiting that sense to make people click and keep people there longer - but that's not quite the same.

Does it? It seems that it ought to add nothing to the content

"Add"? It's a part of the content. It's been in paper for more than a century.

A literal handful of CSS styles would make it more readable on a variety of platforms. Failing that, a full-text feed for the articles would be very readable in an RSS reader.

Umm... that page would have been way better with simple images/animations instead of animating some laggy canvas2d crap based kn my scroll position. Had they not try their page on mobile? It’s horrible.

I enjoy https://text.npr.org/ too

>http://lite.cnn.com/en

Oh my God. I forgot how nice it is when websites Just Work without any lag or stuttering or ads

I miss the days where sites like slashdot had an “ultramode” version. Text only, 0 bloat.

Also thin.npr.org

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