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Plain Text Sports

plaintextsports.com

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Re: Plain Text Sports

#51

Post by Someone »

hnarn wrote: post #49

As a Swede, seeing Americans react to this website is interesting. Sweden introduced "Text-TV" in 1979 (it was pioneered by the BBC in the early 70's I believe), which means that reading text based sports results on your TV is a completely ubiquitous cultural phenomenon for anyone who grew up in Sweden in the 80's, the 90's and all the way up to when the Internet and smartphones took over. Swedish state television (S…

> SVT's "Text-TV" is to my knowledge still the worlds oldest, operational service of its kind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_teletext_services says “The Netherlands has run a regular Teletext service since the end of 1977 on the public broadcasting channels”. That would make that older. Ceefax was from 1974, so it seems there’s room for an even older still operating one.

Re: Plain Text Sports

#53

Post by bmj »

caslon wrote: post #42
CJefferson wrote: post #38

This does look really nice, and the author should be proud, however I wanted to make a general comment (which isn't a critism of this website). If you aim is to help people who want pure text-based interfaces (the blind in particular), this is much worse than a proper HTML page, which they can easily explore by headers. Well-formed HTML is actually one of the most accessible formats, and drawing boxes with CSS (rathe…

Couldn't he just want... a plain-text interface? Why are we assigning motives to creations where none is stated? ASCII art loads fast and the miniscule stylesheet and script barely slows anything down. Plenty of people who aren't disabled like minimalist interfaces, because minimalist interfaces tend to stay relatively static. Plus, in this case, the main utility seems to be that there's a single place you can check…

This isn't "plain text." It's still laid out via HTML (and CSS). HTML tables somehow get a bad rap, but they are perfect for tabular data, which most of this data displayed on this particular site is. A proper "plain text" interface in HTML would be the data wrapped in a PRE tag, right?

To be clear, regardless of the HTML layout, I do like this site, because I can quickly and easily check NHL scores and standings without the cruft that comes from most sporting websites.

Re: Plain Text Sports

#54

Post by throwaway1777 »

abcanthur wrote: post #37
swinnipeg wrote: post #2

I like it! Sites like NHL.com or ESPN.com are borderline hostile navigating this info. It is reminiscent of the morning sports pages in the newspaper I would read each morning as a kid. The one improvement would be if there was page that summarized the league. i.e. Click on NHL and it lists scores, games that day, standings, and possibly scoring leaders. That would be capture all of the important points on one clean…

Great site, I've been using it for months. It's a really different and richer experience at night when the games are in progress. There are added features for the big leagues, such as the NBA games feature a game flow graph of the scoring margin. It truly shines when you're at a sold out NBA game, you can barely get a tweet out due to the crowd size, but you can still refresh the box score of your own game in <second…

That is very neat, and great use of a low bandwidth style site. On the other hand at the NBA games I’ve been to they have the box score on the jumbotron.

Re: Plain Text Sports

#55

Post by yupper32 »

TAKEMYMONEY wrote: post #45
caslon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't he just want... a plain-text interface? Why are we assigning motives to creations where none is stated? ASCII art loads fast and the miniscule stylesheet and script barely slows anything down. Plenty of people who aren't disabled like minimalist interfaces, because minimalist interfaces tend to stay relatively static. Plus, in this case, the main utility seems to be that there's a single place you can check…

This site is HTML, replacing with wouldn't change that. Tabular data can still be plain text. It's just rendered in tables instead of divs and spans. Plain text is good because it 1. Loads fast 2. Can be parsed easily s load just as fast, and can be parsed much faster by humans and computers alike. Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it correctly. This is all costs of markup without any benefit.…

> Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it correctly.

Says who? The owner of the website here owes us nothing.

Re: Plain Text Sports

#56

Post by mminer237 »

erickhill wrote: post #43
oneplane wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nonsense and you know it. If you really want to use plain-text web access you can run a local decryption proxy outside of your low-power old computers and use them as if it's 1989.

I actually have no idea what you just said (and you can believe it). But I'll Google "local decryption proxy" and see if that's something feasible I could try with, say, my Powerbook Pismo running macOS 9.2 with no modern browsers. I'm no engineer, so please don't assume everyone here is.

This site is specifically targeted to software engineers, so it's a reasonable assumption that we can talk about the relevant topics without having to simplify things for people outside that group.

For a reverse proxy, you would want a computer capable of the encryption methods the modern web's security standards demand and to install a web server on it which you can access from the older computer. The server computer does not have to be fancy at all. A Raspberry Pi can do it. For software I would recommend either Caddy (https://caddyserver.com/docs/quick-starts/reverse-proxy) or NGINX (https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/web-server/reverse-...). It can be rather complicated and difficult for someone to do, especially if you're not a web programmer.

If both that and upgrading your computer aren't in the cards at the moment, I would think using the recently-discontinued browser Classilla is your best bet: http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ It at least supports some deprecated forms of TLS & SSL. I hear there's a fork called Phoenix that kind of supports TLS 1.2 even.

(I would recommend using the most updated browser regardless.)

Re: Plain Text Sports

#57

Post by caslon »

TAKEMYMONEY wrote: post #45
caslon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't he just want... a plain-text interface? Why are we assigning motives to creations where none is stated? ASCII art loads fast and the miniscule stylesheet and script barely slows anything down. Plenty of people who aren't disabled like minimalist interfaces, because minimalist interfaces tend to stay relatively static. Plus, in this case, the main utility seems to be that there's a single place you can check…

This site is HTML, replacing with wouldn't change that. Tabular data can still be plain text. It's just rendered in tables instead of divs and spans. Plain text is good because it 1. Loads fast 2. Can be parsed easily s load just as fast, and can be parsed much faster by humans and computers alike. Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it correctly. This is all costs of markup without any benefit.…

Personally, I love the site, and I'm glad it is the way it is: It looks and feels better than any plausible alternative. It sure seems like it has all of the benefits and only one of the drawbacks (vaguely inaccessible).

A person can just make something for their own enjoyment. It's not the end of the world.

Re: Plain Text Sports

#58

Post by mstngl »

hnarn wrote: post #49

As a Swede, seeing Americans react to this website is interesting. Sweden introduced "Text-TV" in 1979 (it was pioneered by the BBC in the early 70's I believe), which means that reading text based sports results on your TV is a completely ubiquitous cultural phenomenon for anyone who grew up in Sweden in the 80's, the 90's and all the way up to when the Internet and smartphones took over. Swedish state television (S…

Same here in Germany, where regular operation of Teletext (or called "Videotext" here) started in 1979[1] and is still a thing. Surprisingly, I experience deaf people in my sphere using it. Of course, all the information is available on websites as well, but the strict form and reduced text amount per information in Teletext seem to make it very accessible for those who struggle with complexity of written language.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext#Deutschland

Re: Plain Text Sports

#59

Post by TAKEMYMONEY »

caslon wrote: post #57
TAKEMYMONEY wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This site is HTML, replacing with wouldn't change that. Tabular data can still be plain text. It's just rendered in tables instead of divs and spans. Plain text is good because it 1. Loads fast 2. Can be parsed easily s load just as fast, and can be parsed much faster by humans and computers alike. Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it correctly. This is all costs of markup without any benefit.…

Personally, I love the site, and I'm glad it is the way it is: It looks and feels better than any plausible alternative. It sure seems like it has all of the benefits and only one of the drawbacks (vaguely inaccessible). A person can just make something for their own enjoyment. It's not the end of the world.

The primary drawback is that it's not plain text, so it doesn't have the benefit that a plain text format would.

Re: Plain Text Sports

#60

Post by [deleted] »

yupper32 wrote: post #55
TAKEMYMONEY wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This site is HTML, replacing with wouldn't change that. Tabular data can still be plain text. It's just rendered in tables instead of divs and spans. Plain text is good because it 1. Loads fast 2. Can be parsed easily s load just as fast, and can be parsed much faster by humans and computers alike. Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it correctly. This is all costs of markup without any benefit.…

> Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it correctly. Says who? The owner of the website here owes us nothing.

[deleted]
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