The beauty of a text only webpage
174 comments
·August 15, 2025nonethewiser
SoftTalker
https://lite.cnn.com/ for news. Especially on mobile.
munificent
This one is a Godsend during natural disasters when power and wifi is out but you still have some cell access and want to know what's happening.
_Algernon_
The (non-compliant) cookie banner covering half the screen kinda ruins the mood.
SoftTalker
Hmm, I don't see that (in USA, on Safari/iOS with no extra ad block).
nonethewiser
call your representatives
josteink
Wow. That’s really nice. Almost good enough to make me consider it for my daily news skim.
zahlman
> this is their real website and not something they've just kept for historical purposes or something. https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
Seeing "<font size=..." makes me wince a bit, but it sure is refreshing to see something like this in the current year. (Also, is the Geico ad hard-coded?)
scarface_74
They own Geico.
thm
nonethewiser
Looks like this is your site - thank you for sharing. I like it. Brief and seems really neutral. Of course there is no such thing as no bias (eg always have to pick headlines to show at a minimum) but I think you do a good job.
Any details on how it works anywhere?
Also noticed this site from your personal site: https://biztoc.com/
I love the information density. By no means a text only site but I think it hits some of the same vibes.
EDIT: lite mode of biztoc in-line with the text only theme: https://biztoc.com/light
webspinner
RSS would be epic for that!
nkrisc
> I would pay good money to watch a clear-glasses-framed youngster pitch Buffet on turning the BH website into a progressive web app.
How about pitching an hour of work to make it easy to read on mobile? Not that I think BH cares, but in this day and age making it layout nicely on mobile is the least you can do and isn’t particularly difficult anymore.
sugarpimpdorsey
Mr. Buffett seems like the kind of guy that makes you shut your phone off during a meeting. When you're conducting 'serious business' in your Brooks Brothers suit and silk tie at the oaken table you'll have a real computer open anyway.
rkagerer
The "message from Warren Buffet" feels a bit slimey.
They already have ads on their landing page for the same thing. That extra message comes across like a used car salesman. He could have phrased it to be informative but in a somewhat more impartial writing style.
nkrisc
Yes I don’t expect to see the BH site in particular be mobile friendly, but there’s lots of text only sites that are terrible to read on mobile. By “mobile-friendly” I just mean set the viewport width to something reasonable relative to the font size.
anewonenow
[dead]
nonethewiser
Yeah text is definitely too small on most of the pages for mobile
mgfist
> How about pitching an hour of work to make it easy to read on mobile? Not that I think BH cares, but in this day and age making it layout nicely on mobile is the least you can do and isn’t particularly difficult anymore.
I think it looks great on mobile. It's fast as shit and I'm still just a 2 clicks away from an annual report. Frankly I often prefer the desktop layout even on mobile.
jmclnx
I am not a sports follower, but the site is very nice.
It is a very nice quick goto when some friends start talking sports and I can pretend I care :)
My favorite sites are:
https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html
Plus gopher and gemini :)
Thanks
scarface_74
The NPR website was amazingly slow to load to be text only
quesera
Depending on your definition of "amazingly", it was probably just a transient quirk.
I load text.npr.org (and lite.cnn.com) several times a day. They both load in times well below the realm of remarkable.
Just timed them:
- text.npr.org 89/96/109 ms
- lite.cnn.com 56/72/133 mshungmung
I've always wanted to create a blog "platform" that's just plaintext or markdown files in a git repo hosted over a torrent-like network. By publishing, you automatically sign every post (commit) with a key, the fingerprint which can be used for lookup on a DHT. By "following" a blog, you're just cloning the git repo from peers and hosting it like a torrent. Things like fonts and colors get sorted out by the user, but the client has some built in theming options. Just roll it all in a simple app so mom and dad could use it.
Free hosting, censorship resistance, minimal styling blah blah blah. What's not to like?
apprentice7
Sounds super fun for a weekend project tbh
hungmung
Feel free to run with it if you want, I haven't coded in a very long time.
rickcarlino
I agree that a text-focused web experience is important. The modern web makes it too easy to add trackers, consent banners, ads, and other distractions that pull attention away from the content.
There’s actually a network protocol separate from the web with a small but growing user base. It uses a Markdown inspired format called Gemtext, has no cookies or trackers, and avoids most of the usual bloat seen in 2025. It’s called the Gemini protocol. It’s not perfect from the perspective of protocol design (which some people on HN can’t seem to get over), but it works, it has real users, and you can try it today.
zahlman
What the hell. Amazing to learn that people actually try to get things like this off the ground. I can remember many years ago having the kernel of a similar idea. Except I also imagined using JSON to describe page layout, like a common "UI form designer" language. On the other hand, this gets much further into the transport protocol, as opposed to just page content.
JdeBP
It has come up on Hacker News fairly regularly over the past few years. Some examples:
floppyd
While I do agree — using at least a non-monospaced font would be a choice that's nicer to the reader.
bee_rider
Ideally websites wouldn’t specify a font at all, other than cases where that’s a necessary part of the design.
The capability is nice to have—for example, if your website is a coding tutorial website, and you have interspersed code examples and prose, put the code examples in a fixed width font. But it is over-used. For example, why do sites pick serif vs non-serif? Leave it up to my browser.
tombert
This is why I almost always send emails as plain text. I want people to be able to read their emails in any font they would like, not necessarily the font I used when I wrote the email.
This isn’t just superficial, some people might use certain fonts that are easier to read for dyslexia, and I don’t think I should make their life artificially harder if it’s trivial for me to simply send a message as plain text.
franga2000
The problem with that is that we've already lost this fight and now "plain text email" means "the recipient will see it in 11pt Courier New".
As for accessibility, the people who need that have already set up the required font overrides and other stuff so it doesn't really benefit them much to use plaintext.
It's sad to think about how things could have been, but that's not the world we live in now...
mxmlnkn
On the other hand, fonts can be an expression of your personality. Shouldn't it be preferable to centrally enable overriding fonts instead of forcing every site designer not to use custom fonts to express themselves? Theoretically, it is easier to remove formatting than it is to add it. Therefore, this functionality should be part of the browser, not the website. Firefox has this as an option: "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above".
Personally, I quite like the site's design and its font. My gripe often is light gray text on a darker gray background. The bad readability that so many newer sites seem to prefer makes me question my eyes or my monitor capabilities. Reader mode in Firefox is also often very helpful.
bee_rider
“Ideally” here is a statement of what I’d find ideal. I’m not nominating myself as font-police or suggesting that we force people to do anything.
But, the feature is overused, IMO. Anything can be used to express a bit of personality, but I do think it is sometimes specified in cases where it really isn’t.
accrual
Pros on cons I suppose. I liked the monospace font and I think it works well for some content, especially shorter form content.
IMO a nice serif font is ideal for long form content though. I remember reading the serifs help guide ones eyes into the next character and create more unique shapes than sans or monospace.
upofadown
There has been some recent research on this sort of thing. It ends up being whatever you are used to. Everyone used to think serif was better for reading but then everyone started reading a lot of sans on computer screens. So now people think sans is somehow inherently better.
It's the same for mono vs proportional spacing. You are better at reading that which you have the most practice with. Most people are not used to reading monospaced prose even if they have seen a lot of monospaced code.
nailer
> Most people are not used to reading monospaced prose even if they have seen a lot of monospaced code.
I've noticed that too - I read code all day, but there's something very odd about having conversations (prose) with Claude Code via a terminal window.
tracker1
I don't mind monospace too much, but definitely not the font chosen... the spacing is just awkward to say the least, my eyes just want to wander when trying to read... and I look at monospace fonts in a code editor all day. Fira Code or Inconsolata.
That said, I'd probably just stick to "sans-serif" and let the browser/os preference hold. It's likely a helvetica/arial alike anyway and can be set by user preference if really wanted.
albanbrooke
Haha, I agree! This is my blog and I can definitely improve the readability.
cosmicgadget
Browser reading mode is an easy workaround.
bee_rider
It is, but it is also a bit annoying that we have a “render sensibly” button now. Why isn’t that the default?
cosmicgadget
It is (a bit annoying).
layer8
It depends, sometimes it doesn’t work on Safari, and Reader Mode still shows monospace. Might be <tt> vs. something else.
Thrymr
But the whole point of the site is to demonstrate how great text-only websites are.
8s2ngy
There is something remarkably beautiful about minimal websites that use primarily text, perhaps with one or two images, and only styles that enhance readability. This is unbeatable UX. Whenever I encounter sites like these, I envision an alternative universe where the internet remained as it was in the beginning: no commercial strings attached, lightweight pages on affordable hosting, and easily accessible information so that search engines actually work. The internet was one of our greatest creations, but we’ve since ruined it with our greed...
smitty1e
Lwn.net comes to mind.
pandorobo
Color contrast is also important. Like actually putting a readable header on the page. ('^_^)
alias_neo
This gives me a silly idea for an "accessibility" mode, where absolutely everything on the page is invisible to sighted people, but clearly, and perfectly readable to screen readers etc.
I did some professional services work years ago, very early in my career for a public-sector client that wanted accessibility features given absolute care and attention.
It really gave me some perspective and I've tried to be conscious of it ever since; though I'm purely back-end nowadays so it doesn't apply as much.
tracker1
Went through similar in the eLearning space as well as on some govt adjacent work. A surprising amount is just common sense when using a well flushed out component library.
What's fun is making an app that explicitly requires well sightedness (scanned documents), and meeting accessibility requirements for literally everything in the app beyond that.
Aside: I wouldn't mind seeing a library where you can give a text weight and text color, with the background color you want to use, but it returns the closest background color that will meet accessibility/contrast requirements.
Y_Y
Maybe you could use STT so that the only written text visible is that which was able to pass through the screen reader.
webspinner
That could be a privacy thing. Just make the site text friendly.
albanbrooke
Yikes, I think I just fixed it. I'd never looked at my site in dark mode before.
1024kb
I quite enjoy reading Chris Siebenmann's blog [https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/] which is very light on theming, as I really like the aesthetic. I have to say though, if all blogs were like this the Internet might seem a bit boring, so I chose to give my own blog some personality.
ftio
When I first built my current site, it was fully unstyled like Chris', but as I started making little tweaks, they snowballed into a proper design. I couldn't help but add more of my personality to it.
Part of the joy of having a personal website that nobody reads is that it can act as a playground, and the design is part of that.
aethrum
What do you like about reading this? Its so hard to read for me on a 27 inch monitor in a full screen browser window, lol
tristramb
This is how most of The Web was in the early days, with some of the clunkiness smoothed out.
its-kostya
You're preaching to the choir my friend. But websites suck for the reasons you described not because people like sucky websites but because they like profiting of the site. For this reason I am very interested to see where Cloudflare takes the new market they are establishing with "pay per crawl". I would love the ability to load up a balance of several dollars and pay a few cents transparently on the HTTP protocol when visiting a website if it means no ads, supporting the creator, and incentivizing clean reading experience.
1vuio0pswjnm7
"The page is just made of text, so it's infinitely reproducible.
You can paste the whole thing into an email to a friend. You can put it in ChatGPT to ask questions.
Hell-you can post the whole thing on X and pretend you wrote it!
You can read it right there, or you can send it to Kindle, save it to Matter, or print it on real-life paper.
It's going to work everywhere because it's just text."
Many years ago before "Wikipedia over DNS" but after "42 ways to distribute DeCSS"^1, I served tiny webpages in DNS TXT RRs from tinydns and modified dnstxt to print a HTTP header above the HTML
Today DNS data is being served via HTTPS: an HTTP header followed by a DNS RR, which could be a TXT RR, which theoretically could contain HTML
Distributed as text
blankx32
Grey text on white background :-(
dcchambers
Do you actually have trouble reading it?
#111111 is pretty close to black.
According to https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/, the contrast is 18.88:1 and easily passes all of the accessibility tests.
bitpush
There's an #EEE text on #FFF at the bottom of the post.
coder543
There seems to be a bug in this blog's stylesheet where the headings are significantly lower contrast if the browser renders prefers-color-scheme as dark instead of light.
I had my browser/OS in light mode, so the contrast was excellent, but I tried dark mode just to see what would happen, and it was... not excellent.
Elfener
And the title too.
The page has a @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) style that causes this, so those in light mode are unaffected.
accrual
Yes, I found the main body perfectly readable, but the lighter grey on white could be a problem for some. I'd use something like #777 or darker here.
zahlman
The title is also showing up as #EEE on #FFF for me, but the inspector view is showing a bunch of other "computed" colour values in the CSS.
null
dcchambers
Oh - I'm in light mode and all the text on the page is #111111 with a #ffffff background. Switched to dark mode and now I see what you're saying - indeed that's not great.
layer8
One problem is that IPS panels only have a contrast ratio of 1:1000 at best, meaning that #000000 black is already gray.
mmcnl
In The Netherlands, Teletekst is still used a lot, a remnant from the 80s that miraculously survived into the internet era. It's one of the most installed apps here.
You can even consume it over SSH: "ssh teletekst.nl"
kh_hk
At some point we will have to get past the meta of blog posts about blog posts though.
SoftTalker
Everyone tends to think that what's new to themselves is new to everyone else too. So that's why we see the same "discoveries" talked about over and over, and fashion trends recycling every 10 years or so.
When you are old enough you see this phenomenon everywhere. My reply here might even be an example of it!
zahlman
> My reply here might even be an example of it!
I think it is, but I didn't realize it until you pointed it out ;)
Maybe one of my favorite examples
https://plaintextsports.com/
Another well known one and particularly interesting since it's one of the most valuable companies in the world and this is their real website and not something they've just kept for historical purposes or something. https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
I would pay good money to watch a clear-glasses-framed youngster pitch Buffet on turning the BH website into a progressive web app.
Lots of examples here (although many do have some amount of styling): https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html