Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Text-only CNN

lite.cnn.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 319 posts

Re: Text-only CNN

#141

Post by josteink »

V99 wrote: post #100
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…

FWIW, base64-js and similar libraries are still needed (though probably not in this case...) because window.btoa() only works on latin1 ASCII strings. Try giving it some arbitrary UTF-8: btoa("\ud83d\ude0b") -> Uncaught DOMException: Failed to execute 'btoa' on 'Window': The string to be encoded contains characters outside of the Latin1 range. (Edit: apparently HN doesn't either; changed to \u...)

> FWIW, base64-js and similar libraries are still needed

For what? This is a non-interactive text-only website. It shouldn't need anything beside HTML and CSS.

Re: Text-only CNN

#142

Post by josteink »

TomMarius wrote: post #109
jordache wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It has no benefit on the client itself, but in this (server-rendered) case, you can think of it as improved PHP/Ruby/....

The question wasn't why anyone was using Javascript on the server.

The question was why a pure-text non-interactive website needs any javascript at all.

Re: Text-only CNN

#144

Post by corgihamlet »

kalleboo wrote: post #133
SubiculumCode wrote: post #41

When Google first came out and we tried it there were two things we liked about it. The first: Good search results. Yeah everyone knows that right. But young people today might have forgotten the second reason we liked Google search back then: The Second: A clean page with a single logo and search field. It loaded quick. There were no banners everywhere, no bs. HackerNews has that feel. It is clean, information dense…

The Swedish public broadcaster still keeps their Teletext[0] service running. One of the cleanest way to get your news (especially on a TV where load times are zero). You can access it on the web as well https://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/100.html [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext

Same thing for Germany! http://www.ard-text.de/

Re: Text-only CNN

#147

Post by zephyrfalcon »

kalleboo wrote: post #133
SubiculumCode wrote: post #41

When Google first came out and we tried it there were two things we liked about it. The first: Good search results. Yeah everyone knows that right. But young people today might have forgotten the second reason we liked Google search back then: The Second: A clean page with a single logo and search field. It loaded quick. There were no banners everywhere, no bs. HackerNews has that feel. It is clean, information dense…

The Swedish public broadcaster still keeps their Teletext[0] service running. One of the cleanest way to get your news (especially on a TV where load times are zero). You can access it on the web as well https://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/100.html [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext

Same for the Netherlands. I read this every day rather than the big newspapers or news channels...

https://nos.nl/teletekst

Re: Text-only CNN

#148

Post by zephyrfalcon »

epigramx wrote: post #108
SubiculumCode wrote: post #41

When Google first came out and we tried it there were two things we liked about it. The first: Good search results. Yeah everyone knows that right. But young people today might have forgotten the second reason we liked Google search back then: The Second: A clean page with a single logo and search field. It loaded quick. There were no banners everywhere, no bs. HackerNews has that feel. It is clean, information dense…

The second reason was the predominant reason. We already had a lot of options for search results with search engines like Altavista/aggregate sites. It's the simplicity of Google that made Google. PS. It's also the reason Google now is increasingly less special (but they do try to keep it simple when they can, subtly).

I'm not sure that was the predominant reason. The search results were also a hell of a lot better than AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo and whatever else was around back then.

Re: Text-only CNN

#149

Post by alecco »

tim333 wrote: post #135
Osiris wrote: post #19

The absolute worst thing about cnn.com is the auto-playing videos. I've been in quiet places and clicked a CNN news link only to have a video start blasting on the speakers. It's not only annoying but a huge waste of mobile bandwidth. Now I just need an extension that rewrites all CNN urls to this site.

Disable HTML5 Autoplay https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto... works for me at the moment. You never know when the blighters will change the format though.

In Firefox:

about:config

media.autoplay.enabled False

Re: Text-only CNN

#150

Post by r721 »

a012 wrote: post #10

Does this belong to CNN? It's great to read news without clutter, just clear contents. I hope there are many sites like this, it saves you from load the whole page then click the reader mode or similar.

Yes:

>In Hurricane #Irma’s path with a weak phone connection? Stay up to date with the text-only version of our website http://lite.cnn.io

https://twitter.com/cnnbrk/status/906655818950553600

Post reply on HN