HN Reader

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.)

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.

> 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.

"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.

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)

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.

I need to enable JavaScript to "proof I am human" just to get a txt file from this site.

Anyway, i'd like to mention the no HTML club: https://no-html.club/index.txt

Also self plug: https://txt.basilikum.monster You can also get the text version from basilkum.monster directly by sending the appropriate accept header.

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?

Interesting. I've implemented naked CSS on my blog, which isn't quite the same:

https://theandrewbailey.com/x-naked

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.)

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.

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

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 think this site/list is more fitting: https://textonly.website/

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.

Very interesting

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/

How cool transition on history back!

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.

Can't get behind the design / UX of this site

might as well add https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ to the list

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?

Is it just me but the links are missing in the text only page?

On mobile, it's extremely hard to read, though.

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