Text-only CNN • Hacker News Board

Re: Text-only CNN

#121

Post by allover » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 10:09 AM UTC

vijaybritto wrote: post #84

Okay, now the server side page is being rendered. The content weighs 6.7kb HTML + 877B CSS + frikkin 52.7kb analytics!! Very fast, but still analytics on this lite site is bothering to see!

Analytics is loaded asynchronously so it doesn't block rendering or interactivity.

Yeah it'd be nice if they used server-side analytics instead, but cost/benefit.

Re: Text-only CNN

#122

Post by jayflux » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 10:15 AM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #36

The BBC News site used to have a wonderful text-only version which disappeared a long time ago. I still miss it. It even worked really well in lynx.

Bbc news should still work well in lynx, or at least it did last time I checked.

Re: Text-only CNN

#123

Post by tu7001 » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 10:22 AM UTC

Is that, that famous fake news factory?:-D

Re: Text-only CNN

#124

Post by mrmekon » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 10:26 AM UTC

kristianc wrote: post #116

If someone could write a wrapper to do this with any major news website, they'd have a hugely popular and profitable product.

I can't believe wayback machine has this. I ran a text-only scraper for ~200 websites back in the early 2000s.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060803053549/http://inr.cjb.ne...

Most were RSS feeds, since those used to exist. The rest were hand-written parsers, which were highly temperamental.

Re: Text-only CNN

#125

Post by hk__2 » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 10:29 AM UTC

skookumchuck wrote: post #45

rmetzler wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people use laptops.

The speakers can often be disabled by plugging a wire that goes nowhere into the line out jack.

I don’t want to disable my speakers just because someone thought these autoplay videos are a good idea.

Re: Text-only CNN

#126

Post by hk__2 » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 10:32 AM UTC

eljee wrote: post #120

Text-only independent news: http://levelnews.org

What’s your affiliation with this site? All your submissions and comments on HN are about it.

Re: Text-only CNN

#127

Post by erikbye » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 10:42 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #13

This is better than CNN.com, but the big problem with CNN is that it simply isn't very good. If you're haven't tried it again, let me again strongly recommend a subscription to the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times. You might be as surprised as I was, once I was free to click around the sites without thinking about paywalls, how much better the reporting is at real newspapers than it is…

Washington Post shows ads even to subscribers.

Re: Text-only CNN

#128

Post by agumonkey » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 10:47 AM UTC

I clicked without thinking. The landing list is a bit too bare, but I love it anyway. Thank god for text (even unicode text)

Re: Text-only CNN

#129

Post by eljee » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 10:48 AM UTC

hk__2 wrote: post #126

eljee wrote: post #120

Text-only independent news: http://levelnews.org

What’s your affiliation with this site? All your submissions and comments on HN are about it.

I built the site because independent news is being increasingly censored/filtered out by monopoly platforms.

Re: Text-only CNN

#130

Post by dom0 » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 10:54 AM UTC

jordache wrote: post #29

ascom wrote: post #3

EDIT: As I wrote this, someone deployed a server-side rendered version of the site. Now the site is perfect. :) This site appears to load ~350 KB of JavaScript, which I think is a bit excessive for a "lite" text-only site. From the sourcemaps, I found a long list of libraries, including: * react * redux * redux-thunk * react-router * axios * base64-js (why not window.atob/btoa?) * core-js * fbjs * react-hot-loader (s…

WTF? why any JS at all for something that's pure content?

Because this site is clearly in need of 250 KB surveillance JavaScript.

So even this "plain text" site still transfers ~98 % bloat and just ~2 % content.