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Comment by Yhippa | Hacker News Reader

My favorite part by far is when you click on a link you see just the plain text of the article sans distractions.

Edit: also it shows a few key news articles with related articles. This means I'm not infinitely scrolling which is nice.

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>My favorite part by far is when you click on a link you see just the plain text of the article sans distractions.

You may also like http://lite.cnn.com/en

It's so refreshing to have pages load instantly. Websites get so bogged down with loading resources from 12 different places. It'd be nice if a static webpage was the default and every change that slowed down loading was explicitly laid out to stakeholders in terms of marginal load time and resources required.

Chrome has a "reader mode" semi-hidden feature which does this to any article on any site, and in my experience works perfectly 99% of the time. On mobile it's a huge saver, especially since Chrome by default doesn't have ad-block, and articles on mobile nowadays have become utterly unreadable with all the crap they throw at you.

This is another reason I like AMP in general, despite all of its issues, it generally is much cleaner [1] than the non-amp alternatives [2]

[1] https://i.imgur.com/qYd1mCX.png

[2] https://i.imgur.com/SwK6unL.png

How do I turn on reader mode for Chrome on Android? (Edit: Ah, seems to be the "simplified view" under accessibility settings.)

Thanks for the edit! I remember doing it way back when it was a flag, using chrome://flags, but nice to see it's now available through the options.

What's sad about that page and the articles it links to is that it could be soooo much better designed and still be clean and fast.

The main list could have dates and times and categories, so it's not just a dump of text links.

Each article could have a reasonably sized image or two without compromising the load speed.

Finally, a single "sponsored by" link could be included in the page to provide revenue via advertising.

It's insane that media companies feel that their sites need to be a bloated mess or barely there, and nothing in between.

Regardless, the fact that the URL isn't served via https is an indicator to me the this is a forgotten service and will eventually disappear the next time CNN does an overhaul of its web servers.

I guess the moment you start adding those "features" the whole process starts again and in six months you might end up where we are today if you let your feet (fingers) run (type) away with you.

I had no idea this existed. I appreciate the link.

I work on something called https://txtify.it that you can prefix onto almost any article URL to get a plain text-only version, e.g.

https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/nyregio...

Love it! It even produces content that supports reader mode (in Firefox, at least.)

Now how do I automate this? Maybe a simple bookmarklet?

If you paste:

var url = document.URL ; var title = document.title ; window.location.href = "https://txtify.it/" + document.URL;

into: https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/

Then drag the bookmarklet to the bookmarks bar, you've got a one-click textify option :)

Very nice! I should add a bookmarklet to the home page.

Cool project! My only complain is it defaults font to Courier (monospaced) which is harder to read and takes more place. You might use ‘Georgia’ which is web safe and pretty legible. Or of course, Times New Roman (just like site on this post)

Please refer:

https://practicaltypography.com/monospaced-fonts.html

https://practicaltypography.com/body-text.html

Since it is literally plain text (as opposed to HTML) it will default to the monospaced font set in your browser.

You're right, but I think this depends on the browser too. I actually pass a stylesheet in the HTTP response header to make text appear white on a black background. Firefox respects this, but Chrome doesn't (at least for plain text files):

  link: <https://txtify.it/dark.css>; rel="stylesheet"

Will have to test again when I get some time to see what the options are. Might be a bit of a hack as there really aren't any HTML elements to target, so it might be that Firefox applies the CSS after inserting the text into an HTML template.

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