[HN Gopher] A small collection of text-only websites
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A small collection of text-only websites
Author : danielfalbo
Score : 117 points
Date : 2026-01-02 11:06 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shkspr.mobi)
(TXT) w3m dump (shkspr.mobi)
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Interesting. I've implemented naked CSS on my blog, which isn't
| quite the same:
|
| https://theandrewbailey.com/x-naked
| nunobrito wrote:
| Very interesting
| merelysounds wrote:
| Honorable mention: https://text.npr.org/
|
| Not technically plaintext (in the MIME type sense), but still
| very lightweight, especially when compared to other news sites.
| lisp2240 wrote:
| Also:
|
| https://lite.cnn.com/
| noefingway wrote:
| I read these two all the time. I wish nytimes.com came in a
| text version, I hate the move to video. I was raised on
| newspapers not mtv...
| imagetic wrote:
| As a long time subscriber the move to video has been pretty
| painful. In general the flow of stories has changed so much
| that I miss more news than I see in the NYT.
| patates wrote:
| In some web apps I code, I just serialize the view-model when the
| page is called with a ".json" or ".yaml" at the end. It forces
| you to be strict about not leaking private/complex data into the
| views and makes power-users' life much easier.
|
| ".txt" is also a good idea for content-heavy pages. Maybe ".md"
| too? I may try.
| throwaway2046 wrote:
| Offering a plain text version of your website may seem like a
| novel idea nowadays but I remember a time when pretty much every
| web page had a printer-friendly version with little to no
| formatting. I suppose printing web pages has become passe, that
| is unless you're printing a food recipe.
|
| Thanks for putting together this list, it would be nice to add a
| short summary next to each link.
| fhdkweig wrote:
| I recall on the morning of September 11, 2001, CNN had to
| completely redesign their site into a text-only version (no
| images or videos) just to keep up with the strain. Slashdot.org
| was the only site I went to that was able to keep functioning
| as-is.
| lisp2240 wrote:
| https://lite.cnn.com/
| djeastm wrote:
| I use this all the time. I wish every media outlet had the
| same.
| al_borland wrote:
| I have to wonder if printing has gone down in popularity, in
| part, because so many websites handle it so poorly these days.
| I will sometimes "print" to PDF to save an article I want to
| read or reference, so I don't have to worry about the site
| disappearing on me. The quality of these PDFs has dropped
| dramatically over the years. With some sites it's almost not
| even worth it.
| shakna wrote:
| On several of my previous projects I've been tasked with
| making the print broken, not just "disabled", to try and
| force people into the "happy path" where there's a download
| button. Despite the beforeprint event that would let me
| trigger the same process.
|
| (I've argued and lost that fight, more often than won it.)
| al_borland wrote:
| In these fights, did they give the justification for the
| download button? I'm continuously frustrated by these types
| of things that go out of their way to break native
| functionality. Is there a way where they can get extra
| information and tracking on the user; is that the goal?
|
| To me the "happy path" is the one the user would naturally
| take, without needing to learn the quirks of each site.
| kiicia wrote:
| Reason is a bit different - print version was built in
| adblocker so they got rid of it...
| meyum33 wrote:
| berkshirehathaway.com is a great text-only site, containing
| troves of buffett's letters with much wisdom. though the actual
| text mostly end up in pdf formats.
| al_borland wrote:
| It looks like they played with the design a little between 1997
| and 2002 (even getting a little wild with an animated gif in
| 1999 during the dotcom era). Once they got it dialed in, they
| stuck with it. This is the mark of a company that knows what
| business it's in and where to focus.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20020329105739/http://berkshireh...
| jmclnx wrote:
| Also there is gemini (real, not google's stolen name thing) and
| gopher. Gemini renders great on Cell Phones.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
| GaryBluto wrote:
| > real, not google's stolen name thing
|
| I never knew Google invented the Zodiac.
| mmooss wrote:
| What column width - don't tell me these plain text gurus use one
| long line per paragraph? Are Unicode emojis valid? What about a
| TUI using Unicode box drawing? Or ASCII characters? 7-bit ASCII
| only for the entire blog? Is there a way to handle input (a
| telnet connection?)?
|
| We've hardly scratched the surface here.
|
| (Now I want to make a TUI site.)
| simonw wrote:
| I didn't know about the .text extension for Daring Fireball:
| https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/31/photoshop-1-and...
|
| Interesting to see how the original creator of Markdown uses it.
|
| I'm presuming that's the version he edits and not output
| automatically converted from an intermediary representation.
| leejoramo wrote:
| Daring Fireball had the '.text' version since at least the
| public release of Markdown, if not earlier.
|
| This should be the version Gruber edits in MarsEdit or BBEdit,
| but it maybe partly rendered by the Moveable Type CMS
|
| The extension is '.text' because that is what he suggested as
| the Markdown extension, but of course most of us went with
| '.md'
|
| While keyword tags are not used on the website, you can see the
| one he uses for his personal purposes at the bottom of the
| Markdown
| bradley_taunt wrote:
| I think this site/list is more fitting: https://textonly.website/
| subdavis wrote:
| Almost none of the sites in that list are actually text.
| They're just minimally styled html/css.
| subless wrote:
| This entirely depends on your perspective/interpretation of
| "text-only".
|
| To me, having only text as the output with no ads, videos, or
| images is "text-only". It doesn't matter how it's presented
| as long as it's just text.
|
| But I also see your perspective. You want plain defaults with
| white background color, black foreground color, and no
| formatting.
| loganc2342 wrote:
| It's more so that "text" in this case refers to "text
| (.txt) file" rather than "letters and numbers"
| subdavis wrote:
| This thread is about text the MIME type. It's not a
| subjective definition.
|
| > The rules are simple - content which has the MIME type of
| text/plain. No HTML, no multimedia, no RTF, no XML, no ANSI
| colour escape sequences.
|
| Your definition is fine for you, but it's not what TFA is
| about.
| abejfehr wrote:
| I feel like the article should've been called "plaintext-
| only websites" or something, because if you had asked me
| I would've also defined "text-only" as image/video-less
| websites
| kgwxd wrote:
| "No arbitrary code execution" is how I'd put it. "Ads" can
| be plain text, they just usually aren't on the internet. If
| a plain text site decided to include them once in a while,
| I'd celebrate the choice.
| ynac wrote:
| I struggle with the purity of meaning for text-only as
| well. Before this thread, I didn't understand the mime
| settings; I've been living a lie with a browser friendly
| landing page that uses:
|
| <!DOCTYPE HTML><plaintext>
|
| And then all the other pages of the site to be pure *.txt
| files. In the end, until there are standards to point to, I
| just accept minimalism as the scale. I have ads, layouts,
| boxes / frames, and all sorts of possibly annoying aspects
| to my textsites. It is a medium that's just as easily
| abused as any!
| Linux-Fan wrote:
| Fun to think of it but I think my website actually got
| removed from that list because it has a logo on top of each
| page. It is available as "text only" (although not text/plain
| but text/markdown) by substituting the .xhtml with .md in the
| URL unlike some other pages on the textonly.website list,
| though :)
| extr0pian wrote:
| Several years ago, I transitioned my Wordpress website to a
| static CSS/HTML only site, editing/updating it with vim and sftp
| https://chuck.is. Overall, it's been a fantastic learning
| experience doing everything manually (though I plan to automate
| more soon). I was inspired by
| http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
| altern8 wrote:
| On mobile, it's extremely hard to read, though.
| evolve2k wrote:
| I'm pondering on this functionality for static site builders that
| already say have some sort of Markdown to HTML Page pipeline.
|
| For most SSG (Static site generators) I've seen that take a plain
| text to html conversion, they usually only serve up .html
|
| Wondering out loud if this would be a useful and desirable
| addition for SSG tools to have the option to serve up say .html
| and a .md (or .txt or whatever).
|
| Am I missing something? Be a good idea/feature yeah?
| Linux-Fan wrote:
| I do it and it works.
|
| The only thing you might be missing: I don't think it helps
| many people really.
|
| I personally still like the feature because I put my website
| under a free software license and then it is only fitting that
| you could view the actual source code. Having the `.md` next to
| the `.xhtml` available helps to achieve this.
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| they should atleast make it super large font and full screen for
| my extra large 32 inch screen, i am literally look at the left
| hand edge of the window to read their articles
| derefr wrote:
| They're literally serving the content with a text/plain media
| type.
|
| If your browser is rendering plaintext documents in a way
| that's unreadable, that's a failure of your web browser to
| serve as an effective user agent for your needs.
|
| (People shoot down the analogous argument for changing the base
| formatting of text/html, because changing the base UA styles
| would throw brittle old stylesheets out of whack. But plaintext
| doesn't _have_ stylesheets that could be thrown out-of-whack.)
| sys_64738 wrote:
| https://brutalist.report
| amarant wrote:
| Why is this page so horrible?
|
| It's clearly intentional, but I just can't think of a reason to
| intentionally make your website this unusable?
| card_zero wrote:
| Have you tried a different theme? Perhaps you're accidentally
| on "nude" when you would be happier with "drunk". Or vice
| versa, no accounting for taste.
| amarant wrote:
| Oh there are themes!
|
| Mine defaulted to drunk for some reason and it's so horrible
| I didn't even realise I could change it!
| kgwxd wrote:
| > Obviously a webpage without links is like a fish without a
| bicycle,
|
| URLs are text. Anchor tags are text. The "link" part is a
| function of the content viewer. text/plain just happens to not
| trigger that function in most browsers, but there's no guarantee
| it won't. If I paste that plain text into an email, it's likely
| my client or the the receiver's is going to "linkify" it.
| ktzar wrote:
| I really enjoy using text.npr.org from my Kindle / Kindle Scribe.
| I'm really thinking about setting up a self-hosted RSS aggregator
| site that's Kindle-friendly.
| johnnyfived wrote:
| Can't get behind the design / UX of this site
| enricotr wrote:
| How cool transition on history back!
| syngrog66 wrote:
| I like the spirit of text-only but Markdown is similar enough and
| gives clickable links, embeddable static images etc. Its the JS,
| CSS, video, audio and surveillance shenanigans which have gotten
| out of hand and become noisey (and nosey.)
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I've been considering implementing a feature like this in my
| blog, but in a slightly more HTTP-ish way. Something like, if
| the Accept header leads with text/markdown, reply with
| markdown.
|
| This feels more "pure" to me, but it also means that you
| couldn't actually use it from a typical web browser. So it'd be
| utterly pointless, but then again, so is my blog.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| If you append ".txt" to any memo (post) or remark URL on my
| blog[1], you'll see a text-only version, formatted like an RFC.
|
| This redesign is only a few weeks old. Previously, only the
| homepage of my blog was HTML/CSS, the posts were all text files
| by default. Most (all?) people were frustrated with the mobile
| experience but I loved it. I only redesigned because I wanted to
| see images on my blog again. You can see the previous version in
| the 2025 branch[2] of my repo.
|
| ---
|
| [1]: https://blog.webb.page
|
| [2]: https://github.com/NetOpWibby/blog/tree/2025
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| might as well add https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ to the list
| ynac wrote:
| "Terence Eden's blog - add .txt to any URl."
|
| For my textsites, I use the whole address, e.g.,
| http://ynac.freeshell.org/Yuengling.txt and will often repeat the
| instruction to right-click on any link to follow. That way,
| navigation is strong and layout just that much more challenging.
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(page generated 2026-01-02 23:01 UTC)