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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

#121

Post by praptak »

nicbou wrote: post #104

Vaguely related anecdotes: - I got caught in the mountains for a few days due to landslides in Nepal. The only available information was relayed by phone between locals. People had no idea of what was going on and their vacation ended on the day the road reopened. It caused a pile up of cars where the road had slid off a few days prior. In some parts, rocks still fell from the cliffs above. We flagged a passing car a…

My Ukraine-based colleague had to ping friends with real-time questions like "is bridge X still unbombed/passable? Do you know someone who lives nearby and can check?" while he was fleeing from the invasion. Fortunately, enough of the questions came back with correct answers and he managed to get the (relatively) safe location.

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

#122

Post by latexr »

valadaptive wrote: post #48

The header image in the article is a 2400x1600 PNG that is 500KB large, apparently due to subtle dithering making it hard to compress. Converting it to a visually-identical .avif (quality 90, 12-bit color depth) takes it all the way down to 15KB.

For an image which isn’t even interesting or illustrative of the issue. Hero images on blog posts have run their course, I can’t remember the last time I felt anything positive by encountering one. They make the page load longer, force us to scroll to start reading, and are forgotten as soon as they go out of sight.

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

#123

Post by Cthulhu_ »

arianvanp wrote: post #89
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.

In the Netherlands the public broadcaster still publishes news through Teletekst: https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-...

Which is cool but it's not web, and few people have working TV reception that supports it at the moment. The web version of Teletekst (https://nos.nl/teletekst) is over 3 MB in size.

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

#124

Post by Cthulhu_ »

silon42 wrote: post #114
bryant wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss RSS.

And Javascript free web... IMO, we need a RSS optimized browser that would also block Javascript before user interaction (or even more).

How would "RSS optimized" work in the context of a browser?

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

#125

Post by aydin212 »

This should be required reading for anyone building government or emergency sites. During any crisis, people have spotty connections, dying phones, and zero patience for loading spinners. A plain HTML page with bullet points would save lives over a fancy React app that needs 5MB to render. The irony is we have better tools than ever to build fast sites, yet the average webpage keeps getting heavier. Somewhere we forgot that the web worked fine before JavaScript frameworks.

That bulleted newsletter list being the most useful thing says everything.

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

#126

Post by reddalo »

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?

I bet you're using uBlock Origin

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

#128

Post by dolia »

aitchnyu wrote: post #116
nicbou wrote: post #104

Vaguely related anecdotes: - I got caught in the mountains for a few days due to landslides in Nepal. The only available information was relayed by phone between locals. People had no idea of what was going on and their vacation ended on the day the road reopened. It caused a pile up of cars where the road had slid off a few days prior. In some parts, rocks still fell from the cliffs above. We flagged a passing car a…

Why does Ukraine trust Telegram so much? Seems they share intelligence-worth stuff there.

Few reasons:

1. Habit. We're used to use Telegram for everything: news sources, social network, messaging, memes. Telegram has more capabilities than other apps. You can't realistically move your family and friends to another messaging app because of all of that and the network effect.

2. General attitude of all people towards privacy and sharing data: they don't really care. It's "Who would even care about my data?" and "I've got nothing to hide" all the way.

I doubt most of people ever thought about the topic of trusting a messaging app. It's not the framework they operate in.

There are two global psyops done by I don't know who:

1. That Bitcoin is safe and anonymous.

2. That Telegram is super safe for whatever shady or private stuff you want to do.

One of the best marketing campaigns ever.

I would also want to use this chance to alert everyone who uses Telegram that:

1. It's not e2e by default.

2. They use proprietary encryption protocol. You don't have access to code.

3. I don't think Telegram is profitable, I don't know how it can be with that scale. Which makes you wonder.

4. If you open in-message links, you have a chance of losing your account to hackers thanks to the old vulnerability that hasn't been fixed for years. You literally have to check the list of devices connected to your account every 12 hours if you want to be safe.

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

#129

Post by hxii »

I remember complaining about this around five years ago [^1], and it looks like not much has changed since, save for the amount of people complaining about websites being full of garbage that serves no purpose or static resources being bigger than the should be.

[^1]: https://0xff.nu/speed-pt3/

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