Hacker News Reader

I’d like to see a plain text browser with javascript and minitel / teletext style graphics.

Maybe it could be good for accessibility .... the concept of making modern websites into plain text just doesn’t work very well (I.e Lynx).

View on HN

I do think that in term of accessibility and ease of use for some remote services the minitel was quite better than the web is. I worked for a company that ran a service until the very end of the network. This service was used to track mandatory farming informations. Farmers could use the phone, the minitel or the web to do so. There was a whole generation of farmers who used it until the very end and ended up having to use the phone as a replacement. Having to use a computer with the operating system and browser layer made the web version of the service much more complex by nature.

My father used this kind of service on the minitel (maybe the one your company was running), and indeed it was quite confusing to him to switch to the web version. The later also came with much more information to process.

edbrowse supports JS thru duktape. Enough to sort comments by date on that Spanish Digg/Reddit clone.

https://edbrowse.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com