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Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

poynter.org

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Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#41

Post by feelin_googley »

The goal is to get the news with as little markup as possible.

Then use UNIX filters to transform it into the format one prefers.

For example, NYT has a jsonp feed I have posted before.

   # replace "world" with whatever NYT section you prefer
   curl -o 1.jsonp https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/world/index.jsonp   

    exec sed '/\"guid\" :/!d;s/\",//;s/.*\"//' 1.jsonp
Not every news site is the same of course. Using a list from journalism.org I took a small sampling of other news sites to see if they had, at a minimum, rss feeds. Most of them did but I stopped after about seven.

As an experiment to enjoy text-only versions of popular news websites, convert the rss to html for a "text-only" version.

The author of radare2 wrote a filter called "rss2html" some years ago and it works well enough for this experiment, so there is no work involved here.[1] rss2html will transform a page of rss xml to html, txt, etc. Build it with libcurl and it can fetch pages too.

    curl -o 1.xml http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/rss.xml
    rss2html 1.xml > 1.htm 
    browser file://1.htm
1. http://web.archive.org/web/20140911194544/http://www.nopcode... (use cvs.nopcode.org mirror)

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/rss.xml
    http://feeds.reuters.com/Reuters/worldNews
    http://www.latimes.com/world/rss2.0.xml
    http://www.wsj.com/xml/rss/3_7085.xml
    http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/UsatodaycomWorld-TopStories
    http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/rss/world
I routinely write custom filters. Even if a news site has no rss feed it is not difficult to produce csv or whatever format I need. However it is tedious. A one-time cost.

Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#42

Post by icc97 »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #25

By all means today's content websites are an abomination, but I don't see why we need to throw the baby out with the bath water by completely rejecting any attempt at styling websites and going back on all readability best practices. I see a lot of websites now which, in an attempt to reject all the nonsense, end up rejecting even basic CSS, and you are subjected to browser width text in Times New Roman with ugly blu…

Relevant if someone hasn't seen this: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#43

Post by tannhaeuser »

borplk wrote: post #8
agumonkey wrote: post #5

These are fine technical reasons. I'll add some human ones: - vanilla html webpages had way more actual content [1] - they don't burden you with updates, social sharing [1] nowadays very often you run into a site with header, menu, flashing area, related articles, footer, cookie warning, etc etc. In the middle of all this you can barely see the first paragraph. And when you scroll down you realize there's only two of…

You scroll down a bit, an obnoxious overlay jumps out "GET THE BEST TIPS IN YOUR EMAIL" ... with an even more obnoxious cancel button "No I'm dumb and don't want the best tips in my email". Then as you attempt to exit the tab the "exit intent" crap kicks in "NOOOO don't go!". Sometimes I miss the days when no one cared about the internet.

You forgot the "DOWNLOAD OUR APP FOR (whatever reason)" part, the app being a custom browser.

Though, apart from Ajax, HTML5 lacks a simple way to compose markup at the browser side, thereby avoiding full page reloads, like SGML had over 30 years ago ([2]). HTML imports are basically dead, and weren't great or widely used to begin with ([1]).

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/...

[2]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/templating.html (my project to bring back markup technologies to the Web)

Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#44

Post by feelin_googley »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #25

By all means today's content websites are an abomination, but I don't see why we need to throw the baby out with the bath water by completely rejecting any attempt at styling websites and going back on all readability best practices. I see a lot of websites now which, in an attempt to reject all the nonsense, end up rejecting even basic CSS, and you are subjected to browser width text in Times New Roman with ugly blu…

danluu.com looks great in my text-only browser. No Times New Roman, no blue underlined links. Maybe the problem is with your browser?

Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#45

Post by unicornporn »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #25

By all means today's content websites are an abomination, but I don't see why we need to throw the baby out with the bath water by completely rejecting any attempt at styling websites and going back on all readability best practices. I see a lot of websites now which, in an attempt to reject all the nonsense, end up rejecting even basic CSS, and you are subjected to browser width text in Times New Roman with ugly blu…

I ended up using https://elementcss.neocities.org/

Calling these things a framework seems like an exaggeration. I prefer to call them “a stylesheet”.

Sakura seems to be done by someone who's not too familiar with typographic conventions. The distance to a paragraph following a header looks to be the same as the paragraph preceding a header.

Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#46

Post by endless1234 »

avian wrote: post #37
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #25

By all means today's content websites are an abomination, but I don't see why we need to throw the baby out with the bath water by completely rejecting any attempt at styling websites and going back on all readability best practices. I see a lot of websites now which, in an attempt to reject all the nonsense, end up rejecting even basic CSS, and you are subjected to browser width text in Times New Roman with ugly blu…

> you are subjected to browser width text Some of us consider it a feature that a website allows the reader to freely resize the browser window (and the text with-in) to the width they consider comfortable.

So if you want to use for example maps on one tab and read text on another, the best UX would be to have users resize their browser when changing tabs?

There are few reasons why a line of text should be longer than, say, 800 (css) pixels, but having the browser full screen might still be a good idea for more app-y sites.

Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#47

Post by unicornporn »

agumonkey wrote: post #5

These are fine technical reasons. I'll add some human ones: - vanilla html webpages had way more actual content [1] - they don't burden you with updates, social sharing [1] nowadays very often you run into a site with header, menu, flashing area, related articles, footer, cookie warning, etc etc. In the middle of all this you can barely see the first paragraph. And when you scroll down you realize there's only two of…

> html5/css3 improved the wrong factors, or at least gave people the wrong idea about where to spend time

Ehm. What does HTML5 and CSS3 have to do with any of this madness?

Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#48

Post by mankash666 »

Just pitched a related idea to a friend, but since a "two sided marketplace" is advised against for bootstrapped startups, have put it on the back burner.

Pitch: A "podcasts for textual content" optimized for low bandwidth.

An podcast like app that lets you subscribe to (textual content) creators, auto downloads for offline reading, allows reviews on individual posts or entire series, presents content in an ebook like aesthetic manner, and has the lowest bandwidth for transmission and storage because: 1. Transmission and storage is in markdown (not HTML) 2. Pretrained language models shall result in higher compression ratios than regular gzip of HTML common in browsers.

Feedback appreciated

Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#49

Post by Un1corn »

mankash666 wrote: post #48

Just pitched a related idea to a friend, but since a "two sided marketplace" is advised against for bootstrapped startups, have put it on the back burner. Pitch: A "podcasts for textual content" optimized for low bandwidth. An podcast like app that lets you subscribe to (textual content) creators, auto downloads for offline reading, allows reviews on individual posts or entire series, presents content in an ebook lik…

Sounds similar to RSS, maybe except the markdown but apps like pocket can already extract the content.

Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#50

Post by fivre »

mankash666 wrote: post #48

Just pitched a related idea to a friend, but since a "two sided marketplace" is advised against for bootstrapped startups, have put it on the back burner. Pitch: A "podcasts for textual content" optimized for low bandwidth. An podcast like app that lets you subscribe to (textual content) creators, auto downloads for offline reading, allows reviews on individual posts or entire series, presents content in an ebook lik…

Congratulations on inventing the newspaper.
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