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During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

sparkbox.com

141–150 of 193 posts

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

#141
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSS is just a list of links to webpages, maybe with summaries. The readers generally fetch those webpages and filter out the text, but every browser has equivalent functionality now. You can do it with literally any HTML page, though some websites try to fight it (since depending on the reader, it neuters ads).

RSS feeds used to contain the full article. That changed when everyone wanted to monetize their blogs.

RSS still contains full articles on a lot of personal sites. As you said, it’s about monetisation and control and when you’re writing with no plan to monetize there’s no point in not serving full content.

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

#142
post #86

> As a web developer, I am thinking again about my experience with the mobile web on the day after the storm In some villages, where plenty of stone is available, people used it for everything - roof slabs, pillars, walls, flooring, water storage bowls etc. Also, villages which had plenty of wood around, they used it for everything. As techies, we say there is an app for everything, or there is a web-technology for e…

We also generally have large screens, faster processors, more memory, faster internet, etc.

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

#143
This used to actually work, at least on some sites. The text would load first, then it would reformat as the fonts and CSS assets are loaded. Ugly and frustrating, which is probably why, now you don't get content until the eye candy is all ready.

But the progressive, text first loading, would be readable from the get go, even if further downloads stalled.

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t put a price on some round-rim glasses wearing EU bureaucrat named Klaus-Dietrich von Regulieren sleeping soundly because of that banner.

If I’ve understood the grandparent post correctly, they don’t need the banner. They wouldn’t need it if the only cookie they set were a functional 1st-party cookie, and since that sole cookie is just to track cookie banner status, they especially don’t need it.

But taking the time to investigate that, get it approved by legal, etc. all takes longer than just slapping a cookie banner component on it.

This is why people complain about the unclear and bureaucratic nature of these laws, it leads to an over complicated investigation and compliance isn't always simple - meaning the safest option is to comply at the highest level and degrade the user experience.

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

#145
post #53
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?

The articles HTML is ~60 kb compressed and ~10x that uncompressed, which accounts for both apparent sizes.

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’ve understood the grandparent post correctly, they don’t need the banner. They wouldn’t need it if the only cookie they set were a functional 1st-party cookie, and since that sole cookie is just to track cookie banner status, they especially don’t need it.

But taking the time to investigate that, get it approved by legal, etc. all takes longer than just slapping a cookie banner component on it. This is why people complain about the unclear and bureaucratic nature of these laws, it leads to an over complicated investigation and compliance isn't always simple - meaning the safest option is to comply at the highest level and degrade the user experience.

But it is not. the text of that legislation is very clear.

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are there no APIs with smaller and faster responses? The Swedish equivalent has --even a fairly respectable terminal client.

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But taking the time to investigate that, get it approved by legal, etc. all takes longer than just slapping a cookie banner component on it. This is why people complain about the unclear and bureaucratic nature of these laws, it leads to an over complicated investigation and compliance isn't always simple - meaning the safest option is to comply at the highest level and degrade the user experience.

But it is not. the text of that legislation is very clear.

Yes but the only thing better than being compliant is being compliant twice over so there's absolutely no debate about compliance.

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

#149

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 terms of a standard, it would be nice if "reader mode" were standardized to request a text-only minimal formatting version of the site.

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’ve understood the grandparent post correctly, they don’t need the banner. They wouldn’t need it if the only cookie they set were a functional 1st-party cookie, and since that sole cookie is just to track cookie banner status, they especially don’t need it.

But taking the time to investigate that, get it approved by legal, etc. all takes longer than just slapping a cookie banner component on it. This is why people complain about the unclear and bureaucratic nature of these laws, it leads to an over complicated investigation and compliance isn't always simple - meaning the safest option is to comply at the highest level and degrade the user experience.

I much rather companies be scared into complying and have some spare banners than companies having grey area free-for-alls with my data.
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