It's been shared here many times, but Terence Eden has a great anecdote about how the UK's GDS standards - lightweight, simple html - meant the site was usable even on a crappy PSP https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven...
During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
181–190 of 193 posts
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#182There is a movement supporting small websites. The links below may inspire those interested in text or small websites. https://no-html.club/ https://no-js.club/ https://nocss.club/ https://1kb.club/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231208000921/https://10kbclub.... https://250kb.club/ https://512kb.club/ https://1mb.club/ I find that the sites designed around being small are usually nice to read since the effort is put…
You forgot to mention https://smolweb.org/
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#183I can relate to this post. During the fires in Southern California last year it was confusing and frightening to know that you're surrounded by fire but you can't get any news or information due to degraded cell networks. We had no power and were just trying to load pages to figure out whats going on and if we should evacuate. There were either no emergency alerts, or emergency alerts for irrelevant things.
Another endlessly frustrating aspect is unfortunately Facebook. For better or worse, it's become a hub of emergency information using local facebook groups. In an emergency you want a feed of chronological information and facebook insists on engaging you by showing 'relevant' posts out of order.
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#184W3C did this
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#185Nice to see other fellow Western NC folks commenting here, I'm in Asheville. I did not know about all of these text only version of major news sites. I'm going to bookmark them.
What saved us from a news deficit after Helene was that we had 2 portable AM/FM radios. Both of the radios took batteries and one of them you could even charge via a hand crank. I highly recommend having a portable AM/FM radio of some kind. Blue Ridge Public Radio (our local NPR) was amazing during this time. Their offices are located right in downtown, which never lost power, so they were able to keep operating immediately after the storm.
I also feel this pain of bloated sites taking forever to load when I'm traveling. I'm on an old T-Mobile plan that I've had since around 2001 that comes with free international roaming in 215+ countries. The only problem is that it's a bit throttled. I know that I could just buy a prepaid SIM, or now I can use an eSIM vendor like Saily, but I'm too cheap and/or the service is just good enough that I'm willing to wait the few extra seconds. Using Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin helps some, but not enough (also I just switched to iPhone last month). I've definitely been on websites that take forever to load because there's just so much in the initial payload, sometimes painfully slow. I don't think enough developers are testing their sites using the throttling options in the dev tools.
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#186> 66 requests
> 5.1 MB transferred
Ironic.
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I understand. Are you implying we should not design our technology around serious edge cases that humans encounter in life? Why wouldn't we target people in crisis when we design crisis management information sites?
I’m saying no one will unless incentivised to.
Oh yes absolutely.
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Seems kind of small it's not uncommon to have .. 210kg LPG bulk cylinders .. and larger. Nearly five standard 45kg household tanks is the smallest capacity fixed installation bulk tank supplied by one local gas company. The option to rent larger tanks on a long term contract exists. > if you're rural/have regular delivery limitations? Many rural locations here have regular deliveries .. the milk gets picked up ever…
750kg (500 gal) is the smallest you can get around here. A house backup generator uses something like 3kg of propane per hour idle, so that tank will keep your fridge on for ~ 10 days. Our area (outskirts of Silicon Valley) saw 20-30 day power outages with essentially no sun that year. The weather is rapidly worsening due to climate change, but they are also hardening the infrastructure. Now, with a battery + backup…
Maybe you don't need such a huge generator. Run your fridge and a small heater, and only heat a small section of your house. Were talking about emergencies here, not keeping your hot tub running. I can heat a bedroom easily with a 1500 watt space heater. And my fridge pulls an average of about 150 watts. Quite honestly, a whole house generator is for convenience when there's a tree that falls on a power line. It sounds like a real waste for an actual emergency.
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#189[flagged]
Please don't be curmudgeonly about others' curmudgeonliness. We're rather hoping for anti-curmudgeonliness on HN.
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oooh... can you imagine if servers actually took the hint and sent only text if the client provided Accept: text/markdown, text/plain headers?
> Accept: text/markdown
funnily enough, the rise in agentic coding has actually made this on the rise