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

Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

poynter.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 108 posts

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

#71

Post by zoul »

Feniks wrote: post #69
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…

Meh I want information not design. I'll happily block any third party font in favour of what my native browser can do. What's wrong with Times new Roman? I can read it just fine.

It’s not possible to separate form from content. You always get the information in some form, some design. Good design makes it easier to get the information.

Times was designed for a different world, I would say that modern typefaces designed for the web are easier to read on the screen.

Apart from that, different content works better in different typefaces.

What you despise is not design, I’d say. What you despise is bad design.

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

#72

Post by CaptSpify »

bartread wrote: post #54
CaptSpify wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally think a better approach is to hand out fully un-stylized sites, and provide a recommended CSS for people to apply client-side. That way the client can adjust things more consistently to how they find it easier to read.

The problem with that approach is it will only appeal to power-users. "Normal" people just don't care. My mum, my step-dad, my brother and his fiancee, my next door neighbours, my best friend and my worst enemy all have this in common: they go to a website and they want to see the content on the page. They don't care why or how, so they're never going to apply an optional CSS file, even in the unlikely event they und…

So what is the problem with that? Just because "normal" people don't care, doesn't mean they have to. If they want a plain-text file of data to read, let them have it.

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

#73

Post by nickjj »

grx wrote: post #64

The rise of static site generators was a similar topic some months ago, I think those two play together very well. There seems to be a trend in disconnecting content and interactive input elements, sourcing out handling of comment systems to providers like Disqus. It allows a smaller publishing interface without the need to invest in big backends. As soon as there is no more input handling needed on my infrastructure…

They do.

I use Jekyll to build my site, which is served up with nginx. 2+ years and 100+ articles later and I think it was a great move. You tend to strive to keep things fast and minimal, rather than bolt on a bunch of bloated plugins and other things that detract from the reading experience.

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

#74

Post by gkya »

jdowner wrote: post #62

I find it astonishing how much of my laptops resources are occupied by a web browser. But I came to believe that it was not necessarily a problem with the web browsers per se but that each website would have a variety of javascript constantly running, and most of that code is not providing any information that I want. So I have turned off javascript in the browser. It breaks many sites, but, especially for news sites…

I have this project of moving most of my browsing to EWW (the native web browser in Emacs) and using a full-fledged web browser only when I need to use some web app. But many content-only websites are going with completely dynamically rendered pages with React or what not, so all you have is void at worst if you disable JS or view with a text-only browser, and garbled up unreadable stuff if you're lucky. Also e.g. the comment hierarchy of HN does not render nicely with text browsers.

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

#75

Post by rimliu »

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'd replace 800px with 55em.

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

#76

Post by rimliu »

Feniks wrote: post #69
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…

Meh I want information not design. I'll happily block any third party font in favour of what my native browser can do. What's wrong with Times new Roman? I can read it just fine.

https://ia.net/topics/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period...

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

#77

Post by gkya »

bartread wrote: post #54
CaptSpify wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally think a better approach is to hand out fully un-stylized sites, and provide a recommended CSS for people to apply client-side. That way the client can adjust things more consistently to how they find it easier to read.

The problem with that approach is it will only appeal to power-users. "Normal" people just don't care. My mum, my step-dad, my brother and his fiancee, my next door neighbours, my best friend and my worst enemy all have this in common: they go to a website and they want to see the content on the page. They don't care why or how, so they're never going to apply an optional CSS file, even in the unlikely event they und…

> The problem with that approach is it will only appeal to power-users. "Normal" people just don't care.

They do care. They just don't know better, and even for us power users content wins over the container. But everybody is complaining about slow websites that don't ever load, and this is leading more and more to the flocking away from the web to the apps. IDK if this is a good thing or not, but sometimes I think that if web became again a web of documents and applications again applications (albeit castrated tbh), that's at least better than what we have ATM.

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

#79

Post by geekamongus »

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, for one, appreciate going back to the HTML4 roots I grew up with, when the web was much more simple and fast, and could easily be navigated with the Lynx browser and your arrow keys.

Links should be blue and underlined.

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

#80

Post by jdowner »

gkya wrote: post #74
jdowner wrote: post #62

I find it astonishing how much of my laptops resources are occupied by a web browser. But I came to believe that it was not necessarily a problem with the web browsers per se but that each website would have a variety of javascript constantly running, and most of that code is not providing any information that I want. So I have turned off javascript in the browser. It breaks many sites, but, especially for news sites…

I have this project of moving most of my browsing to EWW (the native web browser in Emacs) and using a full-fledged web browser only when I need to use some web app. But many content-only websites are going with completely dynamically rendered pages with React or what not, so all you have is void at worst if you disable JS or view with a text-only browser, and garbled up unreadable stuff if you're lucky. Also e.g. th…

Agreed. I am using opera at the moment with javascript turned off by default. But there are some sites I want to use that are simply non-functional without javascript enabled. I add those sites to a list of exceptions. However, as a result of having javascript off by default, I will sometimes find a site that I cannot view and it makes me ask the question -- do I really want to see this content? is this a site that I want to add to my list of exceptions? I find it useful to ask those questions and step back from browsing to reflecting on whether that is the best use of my time right then. ymmv.
Post reply on HN