Ask HN: Why don't websites have 'text only' backup versions?

print links generally don't use the print media css. Usage of print media css means the site prints something different than is what is seen on the screen.

It depends on the site, but it's really not that much effort for any site that a viewer would WANT a text-only mode.

Sites with lots of text content invariably use a CMS to manage that content. It's not hard to build a text-only template, and in fact many sites actually do this - if you browse on mobile Safari, it's called "Reader Mode". I don't know if Android has an equivalent, but I would assume so.

(Playing devil's advocate marketing guy) Why would I allow you to see my product being website, web-based service or simply my advertising without the full experience? If I offer options to see a stripped down version then I am creating a consumer that will talk about the stripped down version and it will taint my brand. If you were to go to my site then when people ask you about it then I want you to tell them that your actions gave a non-optimal experience. (Non-optimal being my opinion of what I think you as a customer should be and not you a reasonable person should be)

When are we going to get over the idea of turning off javascript? No one asks "why doesn't my Java app run properly when I turn off the JVM?" I would argue that the open web is getting to that point with javascript.

JS is an open standard, highly performant, and implemented well by almost every single browser out there. The only people I know who regularly browse without JS are old-timers who got into the habit 10 years ago, before Spidermonkey, V8, Nitro, JavascriptCore etc. revolutionized performance, and before AJAX revolutionized architectures.

Let me propose a different way of looking at things. The concerns you actually expressed are performance, download size, and CLI browser compatibility.

Performance - I don't know of a reason that javascript apps cannot be performant enough, even on low-bandwidth connections. AJAX was invented to improve performance over static websites, by reducing network traffic to just the bits that change with each user action.

Download size - Javascript obviously has nothing to do with how many images or videos a site embeds.

CLI browser - Why can't the CLI browsers implement a javascript engine, and then render the results, just like any other browser? There is nothing about JS that requires a GUI.

edit- speling

The lazy answer is that >95% of users have images and JavaScript enabled, and of that 95%, those who have a slow connection are getting the same experience across a number of websites, so they probably won't be turned off by a slow site.

The better answer is that unless you think about it from the start, providing a no-JS fallback can be hard to do well and may require a fair bit of re-architecturing of your website or web app - something that you probably won't bother doing to do for a single digit percentage of your visitors (text-only support probably has a lower priority than supporting I've actually been creating a reasonably complex web-based application recently, and for fun every few weeks I test it using Lynx[0]. Technically, using forms and very basic CSS results in a fairly usable service. I managed to get a working CSS3-only (no JS) fallback for tabs, some toggle buttons and some other UI goodies. The only problem is that I end up duplicating a lot of stuff on the backend of the app (because I have to deal with both form submissions AND ajax), and there are a lot of things that you can only really do with JavaScript and images (e.g. games, most interactive stuff without reloads, anything to do with images obviously).

EDIT: regarding advertising, rarely do (effective) advertisers online want the largest audience specifically, they want the most engaged audience. Is this no-JS and no-images user interested in downloading an app or a pop album? Probably not, so it's not worth putting in the effort to make them see your ads.

[0] http://lynx.isc.org/