Ask HN: What "developer holy war" have you flip-flopped on?
9 points by meowface 19h ago 26 comments
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5 points by leonagano 1d ago 2 comments
The beauty of a text only webpage
179 speckx 112 8/15/2025, 3:05:02 PM albanbrooke.com ↗
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
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?)
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.
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.
The only thing funnier than this complaint is the thread on Quora criticizing this site, with the top post specifically demeaning the site's lack of a "back-end", postulating that manually updating half a dozen text-only HTML pages in MS Word poses an unreasonable burden to the site operators.
I assume a CMS, complicated database, and mountains of JavaScript would have been a more effective choice. But what do I know? Plain HTML isn't subject to the revolving door of application vulnerabilities so where is the fun in that?
http://stallman.org/ is another one. Though that's more likely because your mobile device is full of non-free badware or something so why encourage it.
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.
It is a very nice quick goto when some friends start talking sports and I can pretend I care :)
My favorite sites are:
https://lite.cnn.com/
https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html
https://text.npr.org/
Plus gopher and gemini :)
Thanks
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:
I provide additional features for users, one is TTS so that they can listen to the article. Another feature is a little icon that appears for links that are external to the website.
I have recently come around to the idea of adding a banner image, as a way of tone setting for the text to come.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44631577
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44645144
#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.
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.
The page has a @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) style that causes this, so those in light mode are unaffected.
Must be a generational thing :)
The real problem that I've noticed in most cases comes from excessive JS. If you don't use JS, then you can't do tracking banner, since you can't track, can't really do ads, and video autoplay via the video tag is already disabled in browsers, so you can't do that either. With no JS, it's functionally impossible to do most of the things the ad-pilled marketers want to do with a website that makes it so horrible for the rest of us.
JS can be used in moderation too, but it opens the door to temptation, and the road from there to slow load times even on good connections is awfully short it seems.
The issue is that I do use pictures occasionally in my posts, and these aren’t just flavor, it’ll be graphs and screenshots and stuff. I also do use Javascript purely for the client-side search [1] and going hyper-minimal kind of means a rejection of JavaScript. Search isn’t strictly “necessary” but kind of nice.
And that’s the recurring theme I keep finding; 99% of stuff can easily be converted to a dumb and fast text-only thing, but then there’s that one thing that makes me keep stuff bloated.
[1] https://blog.tombert.com/posts/2025-03-12-search-v2/
Remember all those nonsense Flash intros sites used to have? For whatever reason restaurants were the worst at this (probably because consultants building these sites impressed the owner with “fancy stuff”). They were horrible… like just show me your friggin menu and don’t make we watch a 30 second nonsense intro to your website.
The modern version of that are these horrible single page templates that everyone uses where you just keep scrolling and scrolling and the “menu” is just taking you to different parts of this scroll-o-rama nonsense. I’ll take basic with good content over fancy design all day long.
Hosting images is cheap too. GitHub will even do it for free!
See Single Serving Sites as an example: https://singleservingsites.cool/
From https://albanbrooke.com/
> But over the past ~30 years, the internet has become much more commercial. Every page is optimized for engagement, so your attention can be resold to ad companies. It just kinda sucks.
later in the same page
> I'm the Head of Marketing for Buzzsprout, a podcast SaaS built on RSS.
And https://www.buzzsprout.com/ads is exactly what you'd expect. The author has no trouble working and getting paid for the same thing they lament.
Perhaps the author is in a similar situation?
1. Monospace which helps with formatting
2. Availability: I don’t think there are a whole lot of built-in monospace fonts
When you are old enough you see this phenomenon everywhere. 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 ;)
I can reformat webpages into formatted text exactly the way I want it; I can save the important bits into an SQL database (I like the text-only output of sqlite3)
I do not use a popular, so-called "modern" browser; no graphics, no automatic sourcing of resources (files), no css, no javascript
I cannot understand why HN commenters believe that text-only is up to the web developer (whereupon the web user must look for aesthetcially-pleasing websites)
Text-only is up to the web user; all webpages look more or less the same to me; it's just text
Why use a graphical browser to view text
If you can come up with reasons, then either (a) you are a web developer or (b) you will be a target for online ads, whether you like them or not^1
1. And you will spend a gross amount of time and energy trying to "block" them
Please don't misunderstand me; sometimes one needs graphics, fonts, etc.^2; but that decision is up to the web user, not the web developer
tl;dr the decision to consume information published on the web as text-only is up to the web user, not the web developer
1. Such occasions might call for using a so-called "modern" browser, with graphics, Javascript and so on. For example, making airline reservations using a website. However, this does not preclude one from consuming website information as text-only, e.g., in the process of searching for fares. This decision is for the web user, not the web developer. Different web users may make different decisions.
It's also very difficult to delegate since they'll want some cybersecurity theatre "verifciation" that requires multiple devices, cursed mobile apps, and "selfies".
I don't see any way around this apart from not taking flights, or paying a lot more for these privileges.
https://hawkins.tech/
In the author's own words:
> “So thank you to everybody who writes and publishes text-only webpages.”
It kind of undermines the argument, and instead insists that the site looking like just a page of text is the important aspect.
I'm sorry but your page is a prime example of web enshittification. It's the kind of site I immediately move on from.
When I get presented with one of these I often just click out of the website.
If you're looking to spread information, make it easy by just delivering it to me unobstructed. Your GDPR bullshit doesn't apply to me anyway, I'm not in the EU.
Text is fed into my brain and then my brain needs to generate the image related to the text so in the end it’s all images anyway.
A text based webpage just causes me to do more work and even then the image in my mind could be wildly inaccurate.
Videos that contrast as he narrating the beauty of text based pages with examples of the contrary and a panning camera.
For this:
>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!
I'd like to see flashcuts of a person in front of the computer actually doing it while he narrates it. With cool music.
That style. Because this is what my brain is producing in my head if he doesn't.
I'm optimistic we'll soon see some AI startup provide proper solutions to these issues. But until then I prefer text.
Besides, flash-cuts of people acting out narration with music offer me nothing. A video like that is functionally just audio—a great candidate for playing in the background, in another tab, while I do something else.