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.
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 5 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway2046 7 hours ago [-]
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.
fhdkweig 6 hours ago [-]
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 use this all the time. I wish every media outlet had the same.
kiicia 4 hours ago [-]
Reason is a bit different - print version was built in adblocker so they got rid of it…
al_borland 5 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.)
patates 7 hours ago [-]
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.
ktzar 2 hours ago [-]
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.
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 13 minutes ago [-]
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
mmooss 7 hours ago [-]
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?)?
Almost none of the sites in that list are actually text. They’re just minimally styled html/css.
subless 5 hours ago [-]
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.
subdavis 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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
loganc2342 5 hours ago [-]
It’s more so that “text” in this case refers to “text (.txt) file” rather than “letters and numbers”
kgwxd 2 hours ago [-]
"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.
6 hours ago [-]
meyum33 7 hours ago [-]
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 5 hours ago [-]
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.
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 4 hours ago [-]
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.)
amarant 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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!
altern8 6 hours ago [-]
On mobile, it's extremely hard to read, though.
johnnyfived 2 hours ago [-]
Can't get behind the design / UX of this site
extr0pian 6 hours ago [-]
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/
evolve2k 6 hours ago [-]
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?
kgwxd 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
nunobrito 8 hours ago [-]
Very interesting
jmclnx 7 hours ago [-]
Also there is gemini (real, not google's stolen name thing) and gopher. Gemini renders great on Cell Phones.
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
Not technically plaintext (in the MIME type sense), but still very lightweight, especially when compared to other news sites.
https://lite.cnn.com/
Thanks for putting together this list, it would be nice to add a short summary next to each link.
(I've argued and lost that fight, more often than won it.)
To me the "happy path" is the one the user would naturally take, without needing to learn the quirks of each site.
".txt" is also a good idea for content-heavy pages. Maybe ".md" too? I may try.
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.
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
We've hardly scratched the surface here.
(Now I want to make a TUI site.)
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.
> 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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20020329105739/http://berkshireh...
https://theandrewbailey.com/x-naked
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.)
It's clearly intentional, but I just can't think of a reason to intentionally make your website this unusable?
Mine defaulted to drunk for some reason and it's so horrible I didn't even realise I could change it!
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?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
I never knew Google invented the Zodiac.