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.
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 passé, 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?)?
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
"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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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/
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?
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.
Also:
https://lite.cnn.com/
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...
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.
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 passé, 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.
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.
https://lite.cnn.com/
I use this all the time. I wish every media outlet had the same.
Reason is a bit different - print version was built in adblocker so they got rid of it…
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.
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.)
How cool transition on history back!
https://brutalist.report
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.)
I think this site/list is more fitting: https://textonly.website/
Almost none of the sites in that list are actually text. They’re just minimally styled html/css.
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.
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.
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
"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.
It’s more so that “text” in this case refers to “text (.txt) file” rather than “letters and numbers”
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
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.)
Can't get behind the design / UX of this site
Interesting. I've implemented naked CSS on my blog, which isn't quite the same:
https://theandrewbailey.com/x-naked
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.
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...
> 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.
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/
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?
Very interesting
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)
> real, not google's stolen name thing
I never knew Google invented the Zodiac.