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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

#91

Post by rocqua »

baq wrote: post #59
WWLink wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Windows enforced maximizing everything like that since the 3.x days. Every other OS tried to enforce not doing that - some taking it to an extreme! I recall when the "maximize" button in OS X was a "zoom" button that stretched the window vertically, but it'd only stretch a window as wide as the content demanded. Of course, the Windows users whined and whined and whined about that until Apple decided to make…

it's actually super easy to make a window take only half a screen in windows 8+ - move it to the edge of the screen. in windows 10, you can also move it to the corner to make it take 1/4th. shortcuts of win+left/right do similar things and also exist since win 8 at least. now whether these people are aware of that and whether they say that having 2800x1200 window is fine for them is a completely different thing...

Those same shortcuts are definitely in Win 7. I'd guess they came from Vista.

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

#92

Post by dredmorbius »

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…

Use em and rem, not px.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/29eqrk/web_des...

https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB/

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

#93

Post by peatmoss »

icedchai wrote: post #89
geekamongus wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, for one, appreciate going back to the HTML4 roots I grew up with, when the web was much more simple and fast, and could easily be navigated with the Lynx browser and your arrow keys. Links should be blue and underlined.

HTML 4 is pretty modern. Do you remember Gopher?

> Do you remember Gopher?

Oh my yes. I even recently (as something of a joke) created a Gopher gateway to a web service.

I miss Gopher in a lot of ways. It was my first real experience with the Internet (via the public library). The signal to noise ratio was good, and I think the result of making some very strong assumptions / opinions on what a document client-server should do, and how it should do it.

I’d love to reimagine gopher for the 21st century—maybe with documents and document maps served up as S-expressions. But then I realize that making the document model more complex or flexible than it is could simply lead to a new webby mess.

Gopher is kind of a museum piece right now. It’s a shame, because I feel like it has value in forcing you to think through a non-shitty information architecture. The web offers such a higher ceiling, but all too often a much lower floor as well.

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

#94

Post by peatmoss »

shpx wrote: post #24
wheresmyusern wrote: post #12

there is a huge problem with browsers right now -- they are very complicated and big and therefore their development is monopolized by three large organizations, leading to browsers that dont adhere to the best interests of the users. and yet, as this article demonstrates, much of the internet does not require any of the complicated machinery in modern browsers. we have seen our culture, the worlds culture, adopt com…

http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

I wonder how Gopher might be extended to offer micropayments.

If someone wanted to create a web-alternative for high singal to noise content in 2017, I wonder if public libraries wouldn’t be the ideal test case.

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

#95

Post by krapp »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #68
bartread wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that approach is it will only appeal to power-users. "Normal" people just don't care. My mum, my step-dad, my brother and his fiancee, my next door neighbours, my best friend and my worst enemy all have this in common: they go to a website and they want to see the content on the page. They don't care why or how, so they're never going to apply an optional CSS file, even in the unlikely event they und…

It's a good point, but it's not a full counterargument. Regular users don't optimize their work environment strongly, but that doesn't mean they don't care. And current situation is that full power over site layout is in hands of site designers. I believe this is a bad balance, and needs to be strongly shifted towards good and easily configurable defaults client-side. That is, I believe the situation will improve mea…

>the reality proves that the commercial web in general can not be trusted with so much power over layout.

That's not a reality, though, that's an opinion. If we were to "dumb down" HTML5/CSS and remove degrees of creative freedom from authors in favor of centralized, client-side solutions, we would do so for everyone, not just the "commercial web."

A web where everything looks and behaves exactly the same is a web which is only interesting to a minority of people. That web would probably have never escaped academia and the world would be worse off for it.

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

#96

Post by jstarfish »

mankash666 wrote: post #53
fivre wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations on inventing the newspaper.

And which newspaper allows you to read your neighbor's blog, your favorite entrepreneurs deepest fears, and the news from South Africa, all preloaded per your subscription choices? (Assuming this platform actually gathers steam). It's not reinventing the newspaper, just like podcasts weren't like reinventing the radio

Honestly, what is the difference between this and RSS? Your pitch sounds like the feature list for gReader.

I subscribe to the local paper, some financial blogs and some tech blogs. They are preloaded onto my device and presented to me in a common format every time I charge it.

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

#97

Post by mmsimanga »

jdowner wrote: post #62

I find it astonishing how much of my laptops resources are occupied by a web browser. But I came to believe that it was not necessarily a problem with the web browsers per se but that each website would have a variety of javascript constantly running, and most of that code is not providing any information that I want. So I have turned off javascript in the browser. It breaks many sites, but, especially for news sites…

I have a 2006 fully functional laptop with 1GB of RAM. I installed Lubuntu on it. All the modern browsers I have tried bring the laptop to its knees. I cannot do anything else but wait for pages to load. My dad's Windows 7 2011 laptop with 2GB of RAM also struggles when browsing the modern web.

On my Linux laptop I have no choice but to use a text browser. I currently prefer links2[1]. The speed along with the lack of distractions is something I enjoy when using a text browser. Text only sites like HN are great (except comments not indented). [1]http://pupnik.de/links2.html

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

#98

Post by nine_k »

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 end up writing bits of custom CSS for many sites I use daily, mostly to alter font faces and sizes, padding here and there, colors, etc. I use the Stylish extension.

It would be great to have this assumed by web sites. They could offer several pre-made CSS versions, e.g. day and night, right via the user-side mechanism for choosing and editing styles.

Alas, this mechanism is missing by default.

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

#99

Post by nine_k »

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…

The problem is not with advanced tools, but with incentives.

Most sites exist to bring a profit. If they are paid / subscription-based, they can be nice as heck. If sell a product, they make examining and buying it as effortless as they can.

But the rest of for-profit sites are vehicles to sell eyeballs to advertisers. They afford to the advertisers as much comfort as they can without turning too much readers away. They exist not for the readers' convenience.

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

#100

Post by geekamongus »

icedchai wrote: post #89
geekamongus wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, for one, appreciate going back to the HTML4 roots I grew up with, when the web was much more simple and fast, and could easily be navigated with the Lynx browser and your arrow keys. Links should be blue and underlined.

HTML 4 is pretty modern. Do you remember Gopher?

Yes, it was in use at the library my freshman year in college (92).
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