Hacker News Reader

Comment by wilkystyle | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated to the content of the article, but what a wonderful site text.npr.org is. It looks like a slightly enhanced version of my iPhone's reader mode and it displays instantly, scrolling with no lag, stuttering, or dynamic loading of page elements.

I wish more of the web were like this.

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Like text.npr.org - there is also a CNN "lite" version too: https://lite.cnn.com/

I agree whole heartedly I wish more of the web were like this.

Bring back WML sites?

note: WML/WAL was a way to enable browsing a web-like thing on low powered devices.

For a bit of time, popular websites were available in two variants, wml and html (more info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol)

No who remembers WAP has any desire to see anything like it return. A 'lite' subdomain is far easier and more effective by not trying to reinvent the entire stack.

As for WML, I'd say transport-level compression made that pretty much academic.

See too: CBC lite[0]

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news

In a similar vein, I've been using https://brutalist.report/ for a while just to browse headlines. All the links lead to the full regular pages, so the articles themselves aren't "lightweight" like the CNN Lite version is. I still like how it lets me quickly peruse many headlines from lots of different categories and only click through onto something I'm genuinely interested in.

I wasn't aware of CNN Lite, I will add this to my news bookmarks.

If only Brutalist had RSS. Especially the summaries page... a pity. Or maybe I'm too old school.

And no doom scrolling. There is a bottom of the page and no Next Page button.

The Compuserve and Netscape ISP website husks also feature no-nonsense text-only news pages with 2000s-style renderings that are near-instant on any device.

68k.news also exists but has been broken for a long time. It's maintained by a retro computing youtuber who seems to have abandoned it or isn't paying attention to its brokenness.

I came across this years ago. It is pretty much the only news I will look at. They only update like 3 times a day too, so no incentive to keep coming back.

Man, find of the day. This is such an refined way of viewing the news (and then stopping and going outside).

It was created in protest to GDPR - "see how terrible the web would be if we followed GDPR" - and backfired a bit, but apparently not enough to delete it.

a friend found it when fucking around with a DNS enumeration tool a while back.

lite.cnn.com is also useful on slow connections

(i post using tor.)

Oath. Fantastic.

Zwounds. Marvelous.

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