[HN Gopher] 68k.news: A Netscape 1.1 makeover of Google News
___________________________________________________________________
68k.news: A Netscape 1.1 makeover of Google News
Author : gripfx
Score : 261 points
Date : 2021-03-29 15:38 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (68k.news)
(TXT) w3m dump (68k.news)
| icameron wrote:
| This is perfect! I have news.google.com blocked on my PC because
| I'm trying to block a bad habit of idly typing it in and getting
| sucked into the void. Came to HN and still found a way to get the
| news drip without as much distraction. :)
| yegle wrote:
| Not having HTTPS certificate is a nice touch :-)
| _joel wrote:
| I prefer this to the full-fat version anyway, even on modern
| CPUs. Bookmarked
| ape4 wrote:
| There are a few html mistakes - stray tags, etc. View source in
| Firefox colors them red.
| gedy wrote:
| Subjective, but I wonder if browsers had defaulted to sans serif
| font instead of serif, people wouldn't complain about "how bad
| this webpage looks". I get the document origins of course.
| butz wrote:
| Is meta tag outside of html intentional? HTML 2.0 was way before
| my webdev days.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| I'm going to hazard a guess, that because ancient browsers
| sometimes displayed html tags they didn't understand, the
| author has deployed a hack to ensure the correct character
| encoding is used on a new browsers without soiling the
| rendering on older systems.
|
| Also, I was hoping that 68k.news supported HTTP 1.0, but it
| doesn't, it's a virtual host on the IP, so needs the host:
| header variable set, which is HTTP 1.1 - that's a bit of a
| shame as it means the original browsers such as Mosaic can't
| access it.
| joemaller1 wrote:
| Wish the width was a little narrower, or fluid. Reading on a
| phone is kind of small.
| IncRnd wrote:
| This looks almost like an RSS feed.
| whalesalad wrote:
| This is great. I have been looking for a "world news in the style
| of techmeme" that isn't the drudge report.
| skyfaller wrote:
| Now, here's a web page that NetSurf has no trouble with!
| franklampard wrote:
| eeew
| AltruisticGapHN wrote:
| Needs a very light gray background.
|
| To be devil's advocate, I feel like those serif fonts were easier
| to read on a low resolution monitor because they were sharper due
| to the pixels being very apparent.
|
| Here not even on a 4K, I find it difficult to read the headlines.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| Super cool. SE/30's are amazing machines. Does HN render on
| netscape <= V4?
| helfire wrote:
| Pretty ok -
| https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#https://news.ycombinat...
| cmiller1 wrote:
| This is wonderful! As pages get more bloated and new crypto is
| used for https my old computers lose access to more and more of
| the web, bookmarking this to browse from mac os 9 later on today.
| artembugara wrote:
| I'm curious where the data get fetched from. The Author mentions
| that Mozilla Readability and SimplePie are used.
|
| Readability to parse the content. SimplePie to fetch the data (I
| assume). Dat from RSS feeds?
|
| In case you want to make something similar, I recently wrote a
| blog on where you could get news data for free [1]
|
| (self-promo) I'd recommend to take a look at my Python package to
| mine news data from Google News [2]. Also, in 3 days we're
| releasing an absolutely free News API [3] that will support
| ~50-100k top stories per day.
|
| [1] https://blog.newscatcherapi.com/an-ultimate-list-of-open-
| sou...
|
| [2] https://github.com/kotartemiy/pygooglenews
|
| [3] https://newscatcherapi.com/free-news-api
| drewg123 wrote:
| Comparing this to the normal Google News, we have a load time of
| 450ms vs 6500ms on a fairly beefy workstation. I have a new
| bookmark..
| tyingq wrote:
| Looks/works nice in lynx (text browser) as well, where google
| news itself does not. Bookmarked.
| every wrote:
| Works nicely in links2 as well...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)
| knodi123 wrote:
| I didn't know the <small> tag was that old! Also thought a page
| from back then would be ascii instead of utf8.
|
| (Also, I thought every page from that era was required to have at
| least one <blink> tag, and possibly an "Under Construction"
| image.)
| Yhippa wrote:
| My favorite part by far is when you click on a link you see just
| the plain text of the article sans distractions.
|
| Edit: also it shows a few key news articles with related
| articles. This means I'm not infinitely scrolling which is nice.
| k1m wrote:
| I work on something called https://txtify.it that you can
| prefix onto almost any article URL to get a plain text-only
| version, e.g.
|
| https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/nyregio...
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| >My favorite part by far is when you click on a link you see
| just the plain text of the article sans distractions.
|
| You may also like http://lite.cnn.com/en
|
| It's so refreshing to have pages load instantly. Websites get
| so bogged down with loading resources from 12 different places.
| It'd be nice if a static webpage was the default and every
| change that slowed down loading was explicitly laid out to
| stakeholders in terms of marginal load time and resources
| required.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Chrome has a "reader mode" semi-hidden feature which does
| this to any article on any site, and in my experience works
| perfectly 99% of the time. On mobile it's a huge saver,
| especially since Chrome by default doesn't have ad-block, and
| articles on mobile nowadays have become utterly unreadable
| with all the crap they throw at you.
|
| This is another reason I like AMP in general, despite all of
| its issues, it generally is much cleaner [1] than the non-amp
| alternatives [2]
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/qYd1mCX.png
|
| [2] https://i.imgur.com/SwK6unL.png
| oconnor663 wrote:
| How do I turn on reader mode for Chrome on Android? (Edit:
| Ah, seems to be the "simplified view" under accessibility
| settings.)
| russellbeattie wrote:
| What's sad about that page and the articles it links to is
| that it could be soooo much better designed and _still_ be
| clean and fast.
|
| The main list could have dates and times and categories, so
| it's not just a dump of text links.
|
| Each article could have a reasonably sized image or two
| without compromising the load speed.
|
| Finally, a single "sponsored by" link could be included in
| the page to provide revenue via advertising.
|
| It's insane that media companies feel that their sites need
| to be a bloated mess or barely there, and nothing in between.
|
| Regardless, the fact that the URL isn't served via https is
| an indicator to me the this is a forgotten service and will
| eventually disappear the next time CNN does an overhaul of
| its web servers.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Reminds me of the light CNN version: http://lite.cnn.com/en
| fhsm wrote:
| or NPR: https://text.npr.org/ which I like more b/c the targets
| of the links have a line width that I find easier to read.
| gigatexal wrote:
| I like this so much more!
| spiritplumber wrote:
| This is beautiful. Everything should have a text mode like this.
|
| I should make it an option for my own site, and I will! Thank you
| for the inspiration.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Neat project. I use NetNewsWire for rss. It's interesting that
| the format people prefer to consume news in versus the format
| that news is delivered in are now so different.
|
| Newspapers went through the same thing. The older papers are all
| stories and were funded through the price of the paper, then ads
| invaded the margins.
| msla wrote:
| > The older papers are all stories and were funded through the
| price of the paper, then ads invaded the margins.
|
| I assure you 19th Century newspapers had advertisements.
|
| For example:
|
| https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86072192/1897-08-0...
|
| And an 18th Century newspaper with advertisements:
|
| https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83021183/1777-03-0...
|
| How far back do you go to find newspapers with no
| advertisements?
| jjordan wrote:
| Any chance of providing an RSS feed? The plaintext nature of the
| actual articles is delightful.
| masswerk wrote:
| Great! For even better results, please, set the background-color
| to `#C0C0C0`. (Netscape default. However, I'm not sure, if this
| was also the default on Windows, as well.)
|
| Compare this bookmarklet:
| https://www.masswerk.at/bookmarklets/netscapify/
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Agreed. Blue text on white background is jarring. And I was
| wondering what the original Netscape Grey was!
|
| Argh. Hoping "Godzilla vs Kong" reviews were going to be
| better. When will Hollywood learn the secret to a good kaiju
| film = less humans, more monsters ;)
| mambodog wrote:
| You can experience this on an (emulated) 68k Mac in your browser
| using Oldweb.Today:
| https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#http://68k.news/
| reaperducer wrote:
| "Sorry, OldWeb.today can not run in this emulator in your
| current browser. Please try the latest version of Chrome or
| Firefox to use this emulator."
|
| Funny that an emulated Mac hates Safari.
| debo_ wrote:
| First impression: "Wow, this warms my heart."
|
| Second impression: _instinctively tries scrolling with
| trackpad_ _help why isn 't it working_
|
| This really made my day, thank you for sharing it.
| biggieshellz wrote:
| Oh wow -- this takes me back to when I first experienced the
| graphical Internet on a Macintosh IIsi! Thanks!
| gripfx wrote:
| Interview with the founder on the Register[0]
|
| [0]
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/29/google_news_netscape_...
| k1m wrote:
| Thanks for the link. Technical part from that interview:
|
| > On a technical level, the site obtains stories through the
| existing Google News RSS feed, which are then processed with
| some PHP trickery. "Google News has a very nice RSS feed, for
| each topic, language and country. So I thought I could connect
| to that feed, and write some code to simplify the result way
| down to extremely basic HTML, targeting only tags available in
| the HTML 2.0 specification from 1995," said Malseed.
|
| > "So I used a PHP library called SimplePie to import the feed,
| and wrote some PHP code to simplify the results into a nice
| front page, using Netscape 2.0.2 on my 1989 Mac SE/30 to make
| sure it loaded fast and looked nice. The articles were a little
| more difficult, because they are on all sorts of different news
| sites with different formatting.
|
| > "So I found that Mozilla has an open-source library called
| Readability, which is what powers Firefox's reader mode. I used
| the PHP port of this, and then wrote a proxy that renders
| articles through Readability, and then I added some code to
| strip the results down even further to extremely basic HTML."
| willchis wrote:
| This is similar to a site that I built! http://feather.news
|
| Best viewed on mobile and you can optionally use a version
| without images by clicking the link at the top right of the page.
| bobajeff wrote:
| I like the layout of yours better. But I still like 68k's
| feature of giving you the readable version of the stories too.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| I think my favorite part is just how short some of these articles
| really are once you remove all the nonsense and extra crap in the
| web pages.
|
| Some articles are actually... 8 sentences. That is it. How on
| earth does it then take 10 seconds to scroll and parse all the
| fake inserts to finally realize that this is a poorly researched
| snippet masquerading as news...
| deagle50 wrote:
| Where are you seeing the short version of the article? Each
| link takes me to the original.
| setr wrote:
| The links try to parse out the text and show that, with an
| additional link to the original article (seems like most
| links fail to parse however)
|
| A successful Example
|
| http://68k.news/article.php?loc=US&a=https://news.google.com.
| ..
| dan-robertson wrote:
| It's reasonable to have short articles in a newspaper, where
| you want to fit in a bunch of short factual stories, or on a
| newswire where you just want to quickly send out some facts
| before competitors. In the former case you just put lots of
| stories on one page. In the latter case, it's often expected to
| be short.
| kevincox wrote:
| I think short articles are great! But it is crazy how much
| crap gets added to nice short articles on most sites.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| I guess a lot of the BS filler text is added just so they
| can fit more ads around the text, huh? The goal for online
| publications isn't to inform you and save you time... It's
| to make you click on ads. They want to have you see as many
| ads as possible, and make sure that you stay on the page as
| long as possible. If the news article was just a one-
| paragraph snippet, you couldn't fit 8 ads on the page, it
| would look absolutely laughable.
| ljm wrote:
| A newspaper or news website would source most of their
| journalism from Reuters or Associated Press, and then
| fluff it up to fit their editorial stance.
|
| The same articles would seem longer in print because
| they're formatted in such narrow columns, wrapping around
| images. There's some thought that goes into the layout.
|
| Of course, the internet breaks that particular illusion.
| And I'm sure that if a marketing department could do to
| their printed paper what they do to their website, design
| and readability be damned, they would jump at the chance.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > I think my favorite part is just how short some of there
| articles are...
|
| In an attempt to enjoy this effect more broadly, I have Reader
| Mode set to enabled by default on Safari mobile.
|
| On Firefox desktop I often use the Reader View button on news
| stories. There is an extension to enable this by default, but I
| have a hard time trusting browser add-ons.
| Kelamir wrote:
| What do you think about recommended add-ons by Firefox, for
| example Tranquility Reader https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/tranquility-1... ? Their code is supposed to
| be checked by Firefox team, so it's probably safe to use.
| cypres wrote:
| > I have Reader Mode set to enabled by default on Safari
| mobile
|
| I didn't know you can do that, thank you!
| jrmann100 wrote:
| I know I'm the only one who's reading news on the Kindle Voyage,
| but I'm definitely adding this to my bookmarks list on the
| e-reader. Super cool!
| sharklazer wrote:
| I don't know if you can fix google news after google broke it
| themselves back in 2011/2012, but this comes close.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Where is the feed this is based upon from?
|
| Google news rss seems to be different and is full with amp links:
|
| https://news.google.com/rss?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
| Bilal_io wrote:
| Regarding the amp links, they could parse the results and try
| to replace the amp links
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Very retro with all those <font size="5"> tags, but that's the
| job of CSS :)
|
| Edit: there was no CSS support in 1.1 :)
| mikepurvis wrote:
| At the same time, it's interesting to see those tags used for
| what otherwise looks like a pretty un-styled page.
|
| Like, part of the premise of CSS was progressive enhancement,
| where just the semantic structure alone would provide an
| adequate experience with however the browser might choose to
| render those elements by default. Basically my question is, if
| the font size tags were taken out and just bare h3/h4/p used
| instead, would that still render a usable page on Netscape 1.1?
| Could you then supply font overrides via a <style> tag in the
| header which could be applied by later browsers?
|
| Obviously it would be a different kind of experiment as the
| result would no longer be identical across all the "supported"
| browsers, but might be an interesting comparison point.
| icedchai wrote:
| Yep, CSS wasn't really supported anywhere until 1997. Most
| places were still using font tags and table-based layouts for
| quite a while after.
| jandrese wrote:
| And in the 90s CSS was unreliable and often difficult to use.
| Internet Explorer made it difficult to go full CSS for a long
| time.
| icedchai wrote:
| I still think CSS is difficult to use. Out of HTML/CSS/JS,
| I despise CSS the most.
| drummojg wrote:
| It's what drove me out of wanting to work in Web
| authoring. I looked at CSS and literally decided "I am
| not going to learn this."
| icedchai wrote:
| It has gotten a bit better. The early CSS era (floats,
| etc) was worse than tables, I thought.
| jandrese wrote:
| Early CSS had a huge problem with this.
|
| "Don't use tables, use CSS!" was a big message. But CSS's
| tools for tabular layout were extremely poor and
| difficult to use, leading to much frustration. It was a
| joke how hard it was to create a simple responsive three
| column layout in CSS, a thing easily accomplished with
| tables and very common on the web. Getting that three
| column layout right seemed like black magic in CSS1.
| rsoto wrote:
| Also http since https was not supported at the time. What a way
| to commit into an idea!
| PAPPPmAc wrote:
| It's committed to the idea so that it actually works on
| period machines. See /r/retrobattlestations announce thread:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/meqlql.
| ..
|
| It's surprisingly tractable to plug 90s machines into the
| internet via ethernet adapters or little serial gadgets that
| can do SLIP or pretend to be hayes modems, but the modern web
| full of crypto and execution environments that can bring
| modern computers to their knees is not kind to them.
| throwaway823882 wrote:
| Considering the content, maybe it should be renamed "Google
| Trivia". It's like a bad version of Reddit with no comments for
| context/addl information.
| fireeyed wrote:
| Love this. Loads much much faster than Google PWA page.
| alex_young wrote:
| Reminds me of text only CNN: http://lite.cnn.com/en
| abricot wrote:
| This is great. Google News has been unavailable in my area for
| years.
| fermienrico wrote:
| I know this is supposed to be retro but I use NPR text mode
| always. No pics, just text, its glorious.
|
| https://text.npr.org/
|
| Far easier to read since the length of the line is absolutely
| perfect. Pro tip: https://practicaltypography.com/line-
| length.html
|
| That said - something is wrong with NPR, a bunch of Lorem Ipsum
| links :)
| alpb wrote:
| It would be great to get this working on each of our personalized
| Google News feed. But I suspect it would require either a
| userscript stylesheet or Google sign-in (if that even gives you a
| personalized feed).
| rkagerer wrote:
| What a breath of fresh air. I forgot how human-friendly the
| internet was before ads invaded.
| eljimmy wrote:
| Viewing the source of that webpage really takes you back. Plain
| old HTML. It's nostalgic beauty.
|
| I recently fixed up an old 486 I purchased off eBay but it was
| bittersweet when I managed to get it connected to the 'net. Most
| websites were inaccessible due to the lack of support for today's
| encryption protocols, those that were had numerous JavaScript
| issues.
| chungy wrote:
| Try browservice: https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice
| dheera wrote:
| Except this bullshit: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC
| "-//W3C//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <meta http-equiv="Content-
| Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <html>
|
| Back in the day, you only needed: <html>
| jhgb wrote:
| Don't you only need <!DOCTYPE html>
| <html>
|
| these days? That's slightly worse but not terribly so IMO.
| dheera wrote:
| Oh I actually quoted the website's source. They have that
| DTD meta crap in there.
|
| But I think you can just do <html> nowadays and it
| empirically just works. Seriously, screw the anti-DRY
| people that want me to put some !DOCTYPE or xmlns tags with
| some W3C links or some DTD nonsense inside ... I should
| only have to specify "html" exactly once, no more.
|
| If I had designed the spec I would have just made it
| <html version="4.0"> <html version="5.0">
| <html version="5.1">
|
| Incredibly more readable, and memorizable. A markup
| language (literally), by virtue of being a _markup_
| language, should not be impossible to memorize. Making
| scary strings like "-//W3C///DTD" part of the spec is
| counterproductive.
| skymt wrote:
| You don't even need <html>.
| <https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-
| ht...>
|
| This is a valid HTML5 document: <!doctype
| html> <title>This is valid!</title>
| <p>Really, it's valid!
|
| Paste it into the validator yourself if you don't believe
| me: <https://validator.w3.org/nu/#textarea>
| jhgb wrote:
| Wow, I didn't actually know that. That feels...so dirty!
| zczc wrote:
| Also utf-8 (or any Unicode) wasn't supported by most (all?)
| Netscape versions. Falling back to default Latin1 works with
| English text though.
| majewsky wrote:
| Nitpick 1: That DTD is for HTML 2.0, which was published in
| 1995. If that does not qualify as "back in the day", I don't
| know what does.
|
| Nitpick 2: <meta> goes inside <html> (inside <head>, really).
|
| Nitpick 3: The <meta> tag is only a band-aid for shitty
| webhosting where you cannot access the webserver config to
| make it send the correct Content-Type in the actual HTTP
| response headers. The modern <!DOCTYPE html> instead implies
| a default of UTF-8 which works well for most.
| skymt wrote:
| Nitpick nitpick: the html doctype doesn't imply UTF-8.
| Valid modern HTML documents must be encoded using UTF-8,
| but the standard also requires that the encoding be
| specified somehow.
|
| > The Encoding standard requires use of the UTF-8 character
| encoding and requires use of the "utf-8" encoding label to
| identify it... If an HTML document does not start with a
| BOM, and its encoding is not explicitly given by Content-
| Type metadata, and the document is not an iframe srcdoc
| document, then the encoding must be specified using a meta
| element with a charset attribute or a meta element with an
| http-equiv attribute in the Encoding declaration state.
|
| <https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#char
| ac...>
| tyingq wrote:
| I do appeciate some of it, but I don't miss this type of thing:
| <font size="5" color="#9400d3">
|
| Though I understand why they are doing it in this case.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Were you just using the browser/OS it came with, I guess like
| Windows 3.1 or 95?
|
| Given their well-publicized insistence on building for a ton of
| obscure arches, I'd expect you could run modern Debian on such
| a machine no problem, with a modern web browser. Might be a
| little slow, especially if you stick with the original disk,
| but should be perfectly usable.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > I'd expect you could run modern Debian on such a machine no
| problem...
|
| Nope. Current builds of i386 Debian require a Pentium Pro or
| later -- I believe it's because they're compiled with the
| CMOV instruction, which wasn't present in the Pentium or
| earlier.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Ah, good point. Looks like Debian Jessie might have worked
| for it? In any case, distrowatch suggests a few others like
| Alpine and TinyCore that might have the proper support.
| StreamBright wrote:
| And this is how the web supposed to be.
| FullMetalBitch wrote:
| And it looks fine and is perfectly functional. Maybe just tweak
| the background.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Looks fine? It is a big blob of undistinguished text. If you
| squint your eyes everything looks the same. The lack of
| column widths means your eyes have to do a lot of scanning
| especially on a bigger/wider screen. The lack of
| color/font/size differentiation means there's almost no
| information hierarchy to it. While we all might complain
| about advertisements and loading times, I for one are very
| glad we have moved on so significantly.
| kalia35 wrote:
| It is indeed!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-29 23:00 UTC)