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During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

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

#71

Post by iberator »

Dwedit wrote: post #39
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.

The point is that it would still work if you block JS, CSS and graphics.

Check it out in lynx for example

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

#72

Post by myself248 »

rationalist wrote: post #26
Lammy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we didn’t know how far we’d have to go to find a gas station with electricity Corollary: carry cash, so you can buy things without depending on Point Of Sale systems being on and able to talk to the payment card networks. My favorite nearby ATM dispenses $100 bills, so I can have several hundred tucked in my wallet without taking a lot of space.

I recommend having a mix of bills; the other person may not have change. Clarification: Sure, keeping a $100 bill tucked away in the wallet for emergencies is a great idea (and I do that too), but wherever you keep emergency supplies, I suggest having a mix of smaller bills.

Absolutely. The $100's are for getting a hotel room or something. The $20's are likely the largest other merchants will break.

My emergency cash stash has a couple $100's and a ton of $5's because I'm not super limited on space, and when everyone else has $20's and needs them broken, a bunch of $5's makes everything easy, and beats carrying a whole bucket of $1's. Learned that at flea-markets.

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

#73

Post by firefoxd »

I have a tab on sublimetext that has been opened since the pandemic and I think it's safe to share my idea since I'm not gonna do it.

*4KB webpage files*

So a website where each page does not exceed 4KB. This includes whatever styling and navigation needed. Surprisingly you can share a lot of information even with such constraints. Bare bone html is surprisingly compact and the browser already does a whole lot of the heavy lifting.

Why 4KB? Because that used to be the default page size in x86 hardware. So you can grab the whole thing in one chunk.

This whole comment is not 1KB.

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

#74

Post by pandemic_region »

sva_ wrote: post #53
Dwedit wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For me in Firefox it only loads the article's HTML (50-70kb) and the favicon (7kb). Are you sure it isn't some addon you have?

It could be the cookie banner appearing.

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

#75

Post by avhception »

I'm on 600mbps fiber with low latency. Some times, I can't be arsed to load the websites linked on HN and simply head straight into the comments. For example, when it's a link to Twitter, I get an endless onslaught of in-site popups. Cookie banners, "sign in with google", "sign in to X", "X is better on the app" and so on and so forth. Meh. I'll sometimes just stick to HN, especially when I'm on my phone on the sofa or something.

Give me a minimal / plain text website every day, it's not just the link speed.

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

#76

Post by zoobab »

bdcravens wrote: post #66

I think many of us in the web space that are old enough were shaped by the "mass outage" that happened on 9/11 when pretty much all news websites went down while we were looking for information. Slashdot was fighting valiantly to say up and was one of the few sites one could find information on the events (if you were in a spot without access to a cable TV, you were very much in the dark). The web and the infrastruct…

When the Yahoo news website was not responding, my reflex was to do a traceroute. The last hop was not resolving, and it was arriving Somewhere in NY. Guess what, they were hosted in the tower. It took a while to get redirected to the West coast.

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

#77

Post by amelius »

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.

Maybe there could be a service which translates any website into a trimmed-down text-only version.

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

#78

Post by subscribed »

sva_ wrote: post #56
rationalist wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a dual-SIM phone with AT&T and T-Mobile lines (a Google Pixel). I wish they had a triple-SIM phone, then I could add Verizon. Now that I think about it, I think you can have multiple eSIMs, but only one can be active at a time.

FWIW, in my Galaxy S23U I can put 2 physical SIM and 10 eSIM.

But only two lines are active at the time.

The same is the case with pixels, never at least.

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

#79

Post by subscribed »

safety1st wrote: post #35
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.

You'll probably want to add localsend to the mix.
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