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 blue underlined links (danluu.com is a good example. Such great content that I love to read but, to be honest, ugly). Surely there is a middle ground?
Something as simple as the following can make your website look neat and readable:
body {
font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
max-width: 800px;
margin: 0 auto;
}
a {
text-decoration: none;
}
Some of us consider it a feature that a website allows the reader to freely resize the browser window (and the text with-in) to the width they consider comfortable.
You can just resize the browser window. Then the content is flowed nicely. Or the reader views, which allow me to set up a nice formatting and theming best for me. Frankly if the reader view did not exist, I'd read a fraction of what I read online.
Also, those who make websites, just please be nice people and keep the underlines below the links. Why confuse the reader? Why impede quickly skimming through a page for interesting links? If they are ugly, they are ugly to you, that's subjective. I like them, and think they are part of the visual culture of the internet.
And then there are the evil guys who style some random stuff like links, but they're plain spans with color: blue and an underline... Least surprise is best surprise.
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.
Calling these things a framework seems like an exaggeration. I prefer to call them “a stylesheet”.
Sakura seems to be done by someone who's not too familiar with typographic conventions. The distance to a paragraph following a header looks to be the same as the paragraph preceding a header.
I personally think a better approach is to hand out fully un-stylized sites, and provide a recommended CSS for people to apply client-side. That way the client can adjust things more consistently to how they find it easier to read.
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.
I just use reader mode in Safari (yes I use Safari.) It creates a great reading experience and because of iCloud, I can pick up reading on my iPhone and the reading experience is identical.
- 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 them. html5/css3 improved the wrong factors, or at least gave people the wrong idea about where to spend time
You scroll down a bit, an obnoxious overlay jumps out "GET THE BEST TIPS IN YOUR EMAIL" ... with an even more obnoxious cancel button "No I'm dumb and don't want the best tips in my email".
Then as you attempt to exit the tab the "exit intent" crap kicks in "NOOOO don't go!".
Sometimes I miss the days when no one cared about the internet.
I miss the 90s web I used to browse with Netscape Navigator. I really liked static navigation menus where I didn't have to stop and infer the functionalities from an icon or hidden expendable/scrolling menus.
I made my first website with it when I was 11 (still have it on a cd rom)...it was so simple to use. In fact, a lot of stuff in the late 90s to the early 2000s were very approachable as a curious noob. I started tinkering with QBASIC during 1997 on an old 286 with a monochrome monitor (still have it), and when I got a Windows computer and I tried to make a Warez site on Geocities lol....manually searching altavista for 50mb rar parts compressing Playstation ISO images on a 56k modem, hosted on myspace.com (when it used to be a file storage)...it took all summer to compile but again everything was easier because people didn't give a shit what the site looked like, they just cared about what they could get for free.
Now it seems impossible to get away without some trendy UI framework or experts reminding us how we are doing it wrong...which ironically increased the webpage filesize to 196kbps mp3 files that works on modern devices.
Also - text only automatically involves a standard that avoids bloat of all kinds.
Once a graphic webpage has traffic but isn't a front-runner, there's a temptation to keep adding more little graphic pieces of crap that slowly the site becomes completely unusable - see slashdot and yahoo.
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.
> Bowden: Text in HTML is the way to go here; you cover accessibility issues and SEO bots, while simultaneously also being usable on the maximum number of devices possible. HTML and CSS are forgiving in the sense that you can make mistakes in them, and something will still be rendered to the user. Browsers are built with backwards compatibility, so combining them all grants you the extended coverage. Meaning that basic sites will work on nearly any phone. Any computer. Any browser.
So many modern javascript heavy websites that are pain to build, pain to index, pain to maintain, pain to download and consume, painful to support older devices. We got here because it was trendy...and now we've come to a full circle.
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, it makes for a quieter experience.
I also like to archive many of the articles that I read, but I don't like keeping bookmarks. So I wrote a small utility to convert html to text by combining 'readability' (python) and lynx (text-base web browser), which does a nice job of formatting the content and storing the hyperlinks as footnotes. This archive is also nice and easy to index if you are so inclined.
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
I have this project of moving most of my browsing to EWW (the native web browser in Emacs) and using a full-fledged web browser only when I need to use some web app. But many content-only websites are going with completely dynamically rendered pages with React or what not, so all you have is void at worst if you disable JS or view with a text-only browser, and garbled up unreadable stuff if you're lucky. Also e.g. the comment hierarchy of HN does not render nicely with text browsers.
Great news! On a related front, I find it appalling that a $1000+ device that can map your face, tell you where you are and act as a real-time assistant renders unstyled HTML with absurdly tiny font size. (Things are still sane enough that the viewport tag will eventually become part of CSS, not HTML [1].) And pelase don't suggest Safari's Reader View as an alternative: it will happily skip tables and short paragraphs, without any warning. Moreover, if it didn't do these things, why not make that Reader View the Deafault View for CSS-less HTML documents? Arrrgh!
"Lite" versions of news sites are a smart compromise between two competing forces: the desire to appeal to audiences that are put off by garish, heavyweight sites, and to do so in a way that doesn't endanger the revenue they get from all the trackers and advertising on their fat sites.
By making the text-only version a separate destination, most of their traffic still flows to their multimedia site by default and by habit.
The light version is always advertised by them for specific use-cases only: quick access in emergencies and for usage in "emerging markets" (inaccurate marketing-speak for low-bandwidth connections on low-power devices).
The market forces behind text-only news sites are not unlike those behind AMP links, Facebook Instant Articles, and the Apple News app. News sites want their news to be read, but not at the cost of not getting paid. It's a difficult problem to solve, and these "secondary" text sites typically get the content in front of the most ad-averse eyeballs anyway, so they're not currently a threat.
The rise of static site generators was a similar topic some months ago, I think those two play together very well.
There seems to be a trend in disconnecting content and interactive input elements, sourcing out handling of comment systems to providers like Disqus. It allows a smaller publishing interface without the need to invest in big backends. As soon as there is no more input handling needed on my infrastructure, migrating to static content is a logical step.
Secondly, I hold myself to the same standards I want to see from other website owners: no bloated adscripts, no tracking and no excessive execution of code inside my browser.
Pages that do not display content with disabled Javascript should rethink their priorities - it not only excludes people with no JS, screen readers or text-browsers; it also fails to make me recommend the link on Twitter or Facebook.
Drudge is a pretty good case study in minimalistic design. By most metrics it's ugly and even baroque but it's brilliant because it is easy to parse and gets to the meat of the narrative that Matt is trying to sell to his audience.
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 computers and the internet. gaming, social media, all kinds of media distributed over the internet -- we have grown into the internet. and with this development, we are fast approaching a platou, a period of maturity where it is clear what exactly the internet is used for by most people in most cases, and also (critically) how those uses are implemented. when the internet was born, we made browsers with a turing complete language built in and we made all the tools very general, all because we didnt know what was going to happen. we had to be ready for anything. this is simply not true anymore.
off the cuff, the internet is used for reading forums, reading news, watching video and listening to music. perhaps a new kind of browser can be adopted that has those things baked in and nothing else. this kind of browser would meet most of peoples needs while being simple enough to make competition possible, thus aligning these new browsers with the interests of users. these browsers would be much, much safer as well.
for other kind of websites, sophisticated web apps that allow you to interface with a service, like email or time clocking or whatever, perhaps those things could be branched off into a new area where js, wasm and binary distribution live. perhaps a different class of browsers. with these kinds of browsers, there is more pressure to align with users interests because users can soft-boycott them because 90 percent of their needs are met by the simpler browsers mentioned earlier.
and perhaps a new standard for interfacing with documents can be baked into these new simpler browsers to further take necessity and power away from js and wasm browsers. for things like emails, remote document manipulation, assignment submissions, etc, a lot of that could be fit into a standard that is baked into the browser instead of being re-implemented in js for every instance.
a new class of simple browsers would create a new division of the internet that is clean, fast, simple and worry free much like these text only news sites.
if one could bake payment into the browser as well, creating the most friction-less payment experience on the internet ever seen, we could see a re-vitalization like that seen with patreon all over again.
I created a text only version https://noslite.nl for the public news service in The Netherlands. It's 1000x smaller in size and performs just 1 request per page.
I want this to be true. But I highly doubt it will stay. :( Would be really neat to see numbers supporting that this is more than just a few fringe people being served.
I've recently started using an RSS reader again and I'm finding that I can find some feeds, but what I don't know where to find is a good place to discuss the articles. More, it does feel like the feeds are a second class citizen, at best. Is amusing to see the page that lists some feeds, such as https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fear-not-readers-we-hav... still list the demise of google reader. Which, sadly, reminds me that I haven't checked google+ is about as long.
For those interested in the accessibility side of news apps, I did a survey [1] of many popular news apps and their text accessibility features.
The general trend was that news outlets generally offer some text accessibility settings, and big tech company apps did not offer any text settings at all.
My conjecture is that the minimalist design trend in Silicon Valley cuts against having many user-configurable options, which unfortunately affects accessibility.
This is a case of what I'm coming to call a Gresham's Mechanism, after Gresham's Law.
The phenomena we see as Gresham's Law, which does and always has exerted itself far beyond coinage -- the first use is found in Aristophanes' "The Frogs", in ancient Greece, referring to both coin and politicians, concerns a fitness or reward mechanism, within some environment, specifically to complexity or quality.
This can express itself as both a non-reward of higher quality, and of a temporary seeking of greater complexity, depending on a number of factors (and I'm still trying to sort out a description of how these may manifest).
In the instant case of Websites, chasing advertising dollars has rewarded more complex, and paradoxically, less informational sites, which are expensive in terms of the compute resources required to deliver them. There is a possible inflection point at which simpler, lighter-weight alternatives can present both more and better information, sufficient visual appeal (see my comments and links elsehere in this thread), and at far less complexity.
This also shows up in various technologies and progressions, particularly as a novel "worse-is-better" option emerges and overturns an established method or product.
[+] [-] kinkrtyavimoodh|8 years ago|reply
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 blue underlined links (danluu.com is a good example. Such great content that I love to read but, to be honest, ugly). Surely there is a middle ground?
Something as simple as the following can make your website look neat and readable:
Some very very minimal frameworks like Sakura attempt to do just that (https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura)[+] [-] avian|8 years ago|reply
Some of us consider it a feature that a website allows the reader to freely resize the browser window (and the text with-in) to the width they consider comfortable.
[+] [-] gkya|8 years ago|reply
Also, those who make websites, just please be nice people and keep the underlines below the links. Why confuse the reader? Why impede quickly skimming through a page for interesting links? If they are ugly, they are ugly to you, that's subjective. I like them, and think they are part of the visual culture of the internet.
And then there are the evil guys who style some random stuff like links, but they're plain spans with color: blue and an underline... Least surprise is best surprise.
[+] [-] geekamongus|8 years ago|reply
Links should be blue and underlined.
[+] [-] unicornporn|8 years ago|reply
Calling these things a framework seems like an exaggeration. I prefer to call them “a stylesheet”.
Sakura seems to be done by someone who's not too familiar with typographic conventions. The distance to a paragraph following a header looks to be the same as the paragraph preceding a header.
[+] [-] CaptSpify|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerflad|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattmanser|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_k|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] icc97|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|8 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/29eqrk/web_des...
https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB/
[+] [-] rimliu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] movedx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msla|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] feelin_googley|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Feniks|8 years ago|reply
What's wrong with Times new Roman? I can read it just fine.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] agumonkey|8 years ago|reply
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 them. html5/css3 improved the wrong factors, or at least gave people the wrong idea about where to spend time
[+] [-] borplk|8 years ago|reply
Then as you attempt to exit the tab the "exit intent" crap kicks in "NOOOO don't go!".
Sometimes I miss the days when no one cared about the internet.
[+] [-] pwaai|8 years ago|reply
I made my first website with it when I was 11 (still have it on a cd rom)...it was so simple to use. In fact, a lot of stuff in the late 90s to the early 2000s were very approachable as a curious noob. I started tinkering with QBASIC during 1997 on an old 286 with a monochrome monitor (still have it), and when I got a Windows computer and I tried to make a Warez site on Geocities lol....manually searching altavista for 50mb rar parts compressing Playstation ISO images on a 56k modem, hosted on myspace.com (when it used to be a file storage)...it took all summer to compile but again everything was easier because people didn't give a shit what the site looked like, they just cared about what they could get for free.
Now it seems impossible to get away without some trendy UI framework or experts reminding us how we are doing it wrong...which ironically increased the webpage filesize to 196kbps mp3 files that works on modern devices.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|8 years ago|reply
Once a graphic webpage has traffic but isn't a front-runner, there's a temptation to keep adding more little graphic pieces of crap that slowly the site becomes completely unusable - see slashdot and yahoo.
[+] [-] nine_k|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unicornporn|8 years ago|reply
Ehm. What does HTML5 and CSS3 have to do with any of this madness?
[+] [-] pwaai|8 years ago|reply
So many modern javascript heavy websites that are pain to build, pain to index, pain to maintain, pain to download and consume, painful to support older devices. We got here because it was trendy...and now we've come to a full circle.
[+] [-] jdowner|8 years ago|reply
I also like to archive many of the articles that I read, but I don't like keeping bookmarks. So I wrote a small utility to convert html to text by combining 'readability' (python) and lynx (text-base web browser), which does a nice job of formatting the content and storing the hyperlinks as footnotes. This archive is also nice and easy to index if you are so inclined.
[+] [-] mmsimanga|8 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] gkya|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] david_ar|8 years ago|reply
https://github.com/davidar/peruse
[+] [-] grx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezequiel-garzon|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/css-device-adapt-1/#viewport-meta
[+] [-] niftich|8 years ago|reply
By making the text-only version a separate destination, most of their traffic still flows to their multimedia site by default and by habit.
The light version is always advertised by them for specific use-cases only: quick access in emergencies and for usage in "emerging markets" (inaccurate marketing-speak for low-bandwidth connections on low-power devices).
The market forces behind text-only news sites are not unlike those behind AMP links, Facebook Instant Articles, and the Apple News app. News sites want their news to be read, but not at the cost of not getting paid. It's a difficult problem to solve, and these "secondary" text sites typically get the content in front of the most ad-averse eyeballs anyway, so they're not currently a threat.
[+] [-] grx|8 years ago|reply
There seems to be a trend in disconnecting content and interactive input elements, sourcing out handling of comment systems to providers like Disqus. It allows a smaller publishing interface without the need to invest in big backends. As soon as there is no more input handling needed on my infrastructure, migrating to static content is a logical step.
Secondly, I hold myself to the same standards I want to see from other website owners: no bloated adscripts, no tracking and no excessive execution of code inside my browser.
Pages that do not display content with disabled Javascript should rethink their priorities - it not only excludes people with no JS, screen readers or text-browsers; it also fails to make me recommend the link on Twitter or Facebook.
[+] [-] jswizzy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akras14|8 years ago|reply
https://www.alexkras.com/eznews/
If I am actually interested in the story I don’t mind waiting a bit for it to load.
[+] [-] nooyurrsdey|8 years ago|reply
Edit: Never mind, found it linked from your blog!
For anyone else looking: https://github.com/akras14/eznews/blob/master/index.php
Nice work!
[+] [-] gunnihinn|8 years ago|reply
http://www.magnusson.io/evil-feed-reader
It does very little, but exactly what I want.
[+] [-] unicornporn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmu3|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wheresmyusern|8 years ago|reply
we have seen our culture, the worlds culture, adopt computers and the internet. gaming, social media, all kinds of media distributed over the internet -- we have grown into the internet. and with this development, we are fast approaching a platou, a period of maturity where it is clear what exactly the internet is used for by most people in most cases, and also (critically) how those uses are implemented. when the internet was born, we made browsers with a turing complete language built in and we made all the tools very general, all because we didnt know what was going to happen. we had to be ready for anything. this is simply not true anymore.
off the cuff, the internet is used for reading forums, reading news, watching video and listening to music. perhaps a new kind of browser can be adopted that has those things baked in and nothing else. this kind of browser would meet most of peoples needs while being simple enough to make competition possible, thus aligning these new browsers with the interests of users. these browsers would be much, much safer as well.
for other kind of websites, sophisticated web apps that allow you to interface with a service, like email or time clocking or whatever, perhaps those things could be branched off into a new area where js, wasm and binary distribution live. perhaps a different class of browsers. with these kinds of browsers, there is more pressure to align with users interests because users can soft-boycott them because 90 percent of their needs are met by the simpler browsers mentioned earlier.
and perhaps a new standard for interfacing with documents can be baked into these new simpler browsers to further take necessity and power away from js and wasm browsers. for things like emails, remote document manipulation, assignment submissions, etc, a lot of that could be fit into a standard that is baked into the browser instead of being re-implemented in js for every instance.
a new class of simple browsers would create a new division of the internet that is clean, fast, simple and worry free much like these text only news sites.
if one could bake payment into the browser as well, creating the most friction-less payment experience on the internet ever seen, we could see a re-vitalization like that seen with patreon all over again.
[+] [-] stabbles|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinspee|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taeric|8 years ago|reply
I've recently started using an RSS reader again and I'm finding that I can find some feeds, but what I don't know where to find is a good place to discuss the articles. More, it does feel like the feeds are a second class citizen, at best. Is amusing to see the page that lists some feeds, such as https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fear-not-readers-we-hav... still list the demise of google reader. Which, sadly, reminds me that I haven't checked google+ is about as long.
[+] [-] gnicholas|8 years ago|reply
The general trend was that news outlets generally offer some text accessibility settings, and big tech company apps did not offer any text settings at all.
My conjecture is that the minimalist design trend in Silicon Valley cuts against having many user-configurable options, which unfortunately affects accessibility.
1: https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/the-importance-of-text-acc...
[+] [-] dredmorbius|8 years ago|reply
The phenomena we see as Gresham's Law, which does and always has exerted itself far beyond coinage -- the first use is found in Aristophanes' "The Frogs", in ancient Greece, referring to both coin and politicians, concerns a fitness or reward mechanism, within some environment, specifically to complexity or quality.
This can express itself as both a non-reward of higher quality, and of a temporary seeking of greater complexity, depending on a number of factors (and I'm still trying to sort out a description of how these may manifest).
In the instant case of Websites, chasing advertising dollars has rewarded more complex, and paradoxically, less informational sites, which are expensive in terms of the compute resources required to deliver them. There is a possible inflection point at which simpler, lighter-weight alternatives can present both more and better information, sufficient visual appeal (see my comments and links elsehere in this thread), and at far less complexity.
This also shows up in various technologies and progressions, particularly as a novel "worse-is-better" option emerges and overturns an established method or product.
[+] [-] rawfael|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuxracer|8 years ago|reply
https://lite.cnn.io/en
https://text.npr.org/
[+] [-] wjdp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BenjiWiebe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techaddict009|8 years ago|reply
Also if you want to convert any existing website to light weight you can use https://googleweblight.com/?lite_url=<News Article URL>