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Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

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Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#31

Post by qznc »

pwaai wrote: post #26
agumonkey wrote: post #5

These are fine technical reasons. I'll add some human ones: - vanilla html webpages had way more actual content [1] - they don't burden you with updates, social sharing [1] nowadays very often you run into a site with header, menu, flashing area, related articles, footer, cookie warning, etc etc. In the middle of all this you can barely see the first paragraph. And when you scroll down you realize there's only two of…

I miss the 90s web I used to browse with Netscape Navigator. I really liked static navigation menus where I didn't have to stop and infer the functionalities from an icon or hidden expendable/scrolling menus. I made my first website with it when I was 11 (still have it on a cd rom)...it was so simple to use. In fact, a lot of stuff in the late 90s to the early 2000s were very approachable as a curious noob. I started…

> miss the 90s web I used to browse with Netscape Navigator. I really liked static navigation menus where I didn't have to stop and infer the functionalities from an icon or hidden expendable/scrolling menus.

You romanticize. We made confusing menus as well with JavaScript (called DynamicHTML back then), Flash, and Java plugins. We were proud of fire and water effects and other gimmicks.

Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#32

Post by nerflad »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #25

By all means today's content websites are an abomination, but I don't see why we need to throw the baby out with the bath water by completely rejecting any attempt at styling websites and going back on all readability best practices. I see a lot of websites now which, in an attempt to reject all the nonsense, end up rejecting even basic CSS, and you are subjected to browser width text in Times New Roman with ugly blu…

I read Dan's website in Firefox Reader View. It's great. I love the plaintext web but I agree some better default styling wouldn't hurt.

Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#33

Post by CaptSpify »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #25

By all means today's content websites are an abomination, but I don't see why we need to throw the baby out with the bath water by completely rejecting any attempt at styling websites and going back on all readability best practices. I see a lot of websites now which, in an attempt to reject all the nonsense, end up rejecting even basic CSS, and you are subjected to browser width text in Times New Roman with ugly blu…

I personally think a better approach is to hand out fully un-stylized sites, and provide a recommended CSS for people to apply client-side. That way the client can adjust things more consistently to how they find it easier to read.

Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#34

Post by gnicholas »

For those interested in the accessibility side of news apps, I did a survey [1] of many popular news apps and their text accessibility features.

The general trend was that news outlets generally offer some text accessibility settings, and big tech company apps did not offer any text settings at all.

My conjecture is that the minimalist design trend in Silicon Valley cuts against having many user-configurable options, which unfortunately affects accessibility.

1: https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/the-importance-of-text-acc...

Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#36

Post by gunnihinn »

akras14 wrote: post #21

I wrote a simple RSS feed viewer for myself for the same reason. A lot of times I just want to read the headlines from top news sites. https://www.alexkras.com/eznews/ If I am actually interested in the story I don’t mind waiting a bit for it to load.

Nice. I did the same a couple of months ago:

http://www.magnusson.io/evil-feed-reader

It does very little, but exactly what I want.

Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#37

Post by avian »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #25

By all means today's content websites are an abomination, but I don't see why we need to throw the baby out with the bath water by completely rejecting any attempt at styling websites and going back on all readability best practices. I see a lot of websites now which, in an attempt to reject all the nonsense, end up rejecting even basic CSS, and you are subjected to browser width text in Times New Roman with ugly blu…

> you are subjected to browser width text

Some of us consider it a feature that a website allows the reader to freely resize the browser window (and the text with-in) to the width they consider comfortable.

Re: Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback

#38

Post by [deleted] »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #25

By all means today's content websites are an abomination, but I don't see why we need to throw the baby out with the bath water by completely rejecting any attempt at styling websites and going back on all readability best practices. I see a lot of websites now which, in an attempt to reject all the nonsense, end up rejecting even basic CSS, and you are subjected to browser width text in Times New Roman with ugly blu…

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