During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website • Hacker News Board

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#31

Post by QuantumNomad_ » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 3:54 AM UTC

treesknees wrote: post #17

joshribakoff wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing, i almost was not sure if the last part was sarcasm. Html itself was the standard, then when it got bloated we got rss. This seems like it’s not a problem of a lack of standards. It’s the company choosing not to promote it.

I suppose I meant more of a best practice - if every news site could be found at the subdomain of lite.XYZ.com, or perhaps some way for the browser to request specifically no images or styles, it’d be easier for the end user to find. RSS is a good point that I didn’t consider. Although it tends to be a summary and hyperlink to the main site.

It’s too bad that WML from WAP is not used anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol

WML pages had mostly text and hyperlinks from what I remember and even though it supported images too I think most such basic pages would be readable even if you turned image loading off.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#32

Post by parallax_error » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:00 AM UTC

Reading this on airline wifi right now makes me realise just how unusable some stuff becomes with choppy internet. E.g. I can’t change settings on the LinkedIn app because the request to load the settings page fails :/.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#33

Post by loktarogar » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:02 AM UTC

Some things you don't know people need until you're directly affected. For me, it was an injury related light sensitivity that made me realise dark mode isn't just a frivolous addition for looks

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#34

Post by defrost » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:13 AM UTC

hedora wrote: post #29

tehwebguy wrote: post #16

Other Helene stuff I took note of: - AT&T was completely down for us but Verizon and its MVNOs were up - I had a Verizon MVNO secondary e-sim that came free with a home internet plan, unused until the hurricane hit - It worked pretty well! - The day the Verizon disaster internet trucks showed up at the police station in our town my Verizon MVNO internet went down Non-internet learnings: - Fill up your vehicle’s fuel…

From a Pineapple Express a few years back (80+ mph gusts and lots of landslides): - When putting in rural/exurb solar, make sure you have a secondary charge source for your house batteries. This can be a car or a propane generator, but check compatibility before buying anything. Solar won’t cut it (storms are cloudy), and propane won’t cut it (no roads, and also, there’s probably a shortage of supply and trucks). - W…

> and propane won’t cut it

Depends entirely on tank size really.

Standard (in Australia) is 2x45kg household cylinders (chest high to an adult) for household cooking.

(Finish one, switch to the other while waiting for swap).

It's not hard to have eight or more cyclinders on standby and to keep them topped up for when needed.

For rural / quasi industrial, furnaces, generators, etc it's not uncommon to have fixed installation 210kg LPG bulk cylinders filled by supply truck .. and larger.

When disaster strikes a bulk tank lasts a long time if the primary drains on it (eg: a tile or glass furnace) are wound back or turned off.

Eg: https://www.supagas.com.au/for-home/lpg-gas-bottles/tanks

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#35

Post by safety1st » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:21 AM UTC

getpokedagain wrote: post #19

One thing that I would also suggest folks who are resonating with this piece consider... Local copies of important information on your mobile device. Generally your laptops are not going to see much use. Mobile apps tend to fake local data and store lots of things to the cloud. We tend to ignore such things like backups and local copies nowadays. Most of the time we can get away without any worry here but consider ke…

Syncthing is the way! Along with the Material Files app from F-droid, I finally get to have a file based workflow on Android.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#36

Post by firesteelrain » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:21 AM UTC

Author should look into WinLink. There is WinLink Wednesdays where WinLink is practiced. A lot of reports come out of WinLink and it’s all text. Of course need to be an Amateur Radio Operator

Many years ago, Google had a service I would use pre-Smartphone days to search when I was away from the PC and needed info for like a restaurant’s number. You would text 46645 and it would send you search results. It was useful during hurricanes.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#37

Post by McGlockenshire » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:24 AM UTC

netsharc wrote: post #18

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #15

[flagged]

It's not really written there, but how about a loading experience that gives you the important information, and then loads the bells and whistles as the JavaScript gets loaded and run. First make sure the plain text information gets loaded, maybe a simple JPEG when something graphical like a map is needed, and then load the Megabytes of React or Angular to make it all pretty and the map be interactive...

Just as server side rendering was reinvented from first principles by the current generation, now they have rediscovered progressive enhancement! There might be hope for us yet!

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#38

Post by McGlockenshire » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:27 AM UTC

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #15

[flagged]

This is the same attitude that results in modern developers ignoring low end consumer hardware, locking out a customer base because they aren't rich enough.

Get some perspective. Some of us have to live on 500kbit/s. The modern web is hell, and because it doesn't impact anybody with money, nobody gives a shit.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#39

Post by Dwedit » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:27 AM UTC

treesknees wrote: post #2

Several news sites offer text only versions. https://lite.cnn.com/ https://text.npr.org/ https://wttr.in/ More listed at https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites It’d be great if there was some standard that allowed these to be easily found, and supported on the local news sites.

I looked at a CNN "lite" article, and it includes 560KB of stuff (lots and lots of CSS declarations) in addition to the actual 11KB of article content.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#40

Post by neilv » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:28 AM UTC

One way to get to this is to start with almost-'94 HTML:

  
  
      
          Some Topic
      
      
          Some Topic

          Information goes here.

          Information goes here.

          Information goes here.

Then add a little non-'94 CSS styling.

If you decide to add an off-the-shelf wad of CSS, like Pico.css, consider hosting it alongside your HTML (rather than turning it into another third-party dependency and CDN cross-site surveillance tracker). Minified, and single-request.