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Text-only CNN

lite.cnn.io

151–160 of 319 posts

Re: Text-only CNN

#152
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a few reasons: * To overcome government censorship and surveillance. * To stop internet providers from injecting ads and tracking scripts.

>To overcome government censorship and surveillance. But the site isn't being censored? Also https won't stop the government from knowing that you connected to those servers. I agree that we want to avoid censorship and surveillance in general, but it really doesn't seem relevant here. >To stop internet providers from injecting ads and tracking scripts. Is your ISP actually doing that to you right now? Or is that jus…

> Is your ISP actually doing that to you right now? Or is that just hypothetical?

Yes there are multiple instances where my isp was injecting stuff. More frequently at public wifi spots.

Re: Text-only CNN

#153
I love this. Pure information without bloat. One of the reaons I love "Teletekst" "teletext"). It also looks very nice, despite the fact that is 30 years old. 101 is news. 818 is domestic football. It's actually still very popular in The Netherlands, and the app is one of the most used apps here.

https://nos.nl/teletekst#101

Re: Text-only CNN

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because when you're treating React as a templating language, it's easier to let it run on the client side during development and add server rendering later.

Re: Text-only CNN

#156
This is what the world needs.

Seriously, I hate this trend to bloat up websites with the rage of a thousand suns. There is absolutely no value, but it increases bandwith usage, load times and CPU/RAM usage. News websites having "fancy, modern" websites actually make me think less of them.

Fuck this web-bloat shit. The web is broken.

Re: Text-only CNN

#157
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a few reasons: * To overcome government censorship and surveillance. * To stop internet providers from injecting ads and tracking scripts.

>To overcome government censorship and surveillance. But the site isn't being censored? Also https won't stop the government from knowing that you connected to those servers. I agree that we want to avoid censorship and surveillance in general, but it really doesn't seem relevant here. >To stop internet providers from injecting ads and tracking scripts. Is your ISP actually doing that to you right now? Or is that jus…

> Is your ISP actually doing that to you right now? Or is that just hypothetical?

I was on a Southwest flight earlier this week which did exactly this, using HTTP injection to display an overlay on every HTTP page. It's certainly useful to provide flight information (or Amber alerts, weather information, billing alerts), but it's Just Wrong™ to violate the integrity of a communication to do so. Perhaps there should be some standard protocol for ISPs to send messages to clients, permitting the connected OS to determine how to display them?

Re: Text-only CNN

#158
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are 100% correct. Honestly, it doesn't need CSS even, although that's nice to have.

I've got NoScript on, and now the pages load perfectly. I think I may return to being a CNN reader now. If only they could figure out how to monetise this.

Re: Text-only CNN

#159
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need to encrypt your connection to that site? No sensitive info sent.

Just a few reasons: * To overcome government censorship and surveillance. * To stop internet providers from injecting ads and tracking scripts.

It wouldn't stop surveillance, because there are only a limited number of pages it can serve. It's possible for an attacker to download all of them and figure out what you're reading by traffic analysis.

Re: Text-only CNN

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. In particular, Google's search were much better for ordinary users who didn't do complex searches....
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