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.
The (non-compliant) cookie banner covering half the screen kinda ruins the mood.
SoftTalker · 1h ago
Hmm, I don't see that (in USA, on Safari/iOS with no extra ad block).
josteink · 2h ago
Wow. That’s really nice. Almost good enough to make me consider it for my daily news skim.
zahlman · 2h ago
> 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 · 2h ago
They own Geico.
nkrisc · 2h ago
> 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 · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
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.
sugarpimpdorsey · 27m ago
Are you really that bothered by a text-only sales pitch (which has an old-timey "I sell vacuum cleaners door to door" charm to it), or would you have preferred a full page interstitial demanding you disable your ad blocker, with a size 1pt font "I'll do it next time"?
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?
nkrisc · 1h ago
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.
sugarpimpdorsey · 1h ago
Most of these sites predate viewport tags.
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.
mgfist · 1h ago
> 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 · 2h ago
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 :)
The NPR website was amazingly slow to load to be text only
quesera · 27m ago
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 ms
bArray · 5m ago
I think there is space for images, but they should be carefully considered. They should add to the overall text.
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.
torgoguys · 27s ago
It sounds like you are adding things with care and thought, but is there a reason the user might care that the link is to an external site?
pandorobo · 2h ago
Color contrast is also important.
Like actually putting a readable header on the page. ('^_^)
alias_neo · 2h ago
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 · 40m ago
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 · 50m ago
Maybe you could use STT so that the only written text visible is that which was able to pass through the screen reader.
albanbrooke · 1h ago
Yikes, I think I just fixed it. I'd never looked at my site in dark mode before.
1024kb · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
This is how most of The Web was in the early days, with some of the clunkiness smoothed out.
floppyd · 2h ago
While I do agree — using at least a non-monospaced font would be a choice that's nicer to the reader.
bee_rider · 2h ago
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 · 1h ago
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.
tracker1 · 33m ago
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.
accrual · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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 · 1h ago
> 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.
albanbrooke · 2h ago
Haha, I agree! This is my blog and I can definitely improve the readability.
cosmicgadget · 2h ago
Browser reading mode is an easy workaround.
bee_rider · 2h ago
It is, but it is also a bit annoying that we have a “render sensibly” button now. Why isn’t that the default?
cosmicgadget · 24m ago
It is (a bit annoying).
layer8 · 1h ago
It depends, sometimes it doesn’t work on Safari, and Reader Mode still shows monospace. Might be <tt> vs. something else.
rickcarlino · 2h ago
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.
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 · 1h ago
It has come up on Hacker News fairly regularly over the past few years. Some examples:
There's an #EEE text on #FFF at the bottom of the post.
coder543 · 2h ago
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.
albanbrooke · 1h ago
Thank you! This is my site, and your comment helped me fix it.
Elfener · 2h ago
And the title too.
The page has a @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) style that causes this, so those in light mode are unaffected.
dcchambers · 2h ago
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.
zahlman · 2h ago
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.
accrual · 2h ago
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.
dcchambers · 2h ago
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 · 1h ago
One problem is that IPS panels only have a contrast ratio of 1:1000 at best, meaning that #000000 black is already gray.
BrouteMinou · 2h ago
I read the whole thing in Lynx. That's a beautiful thing, too.
Hadriel · 46m ago
how? Lynx looks like a opinionated boilerplate for creating apps?
Images and video are great, but everything in moderation. An image here and there to illustrate or demonstrate, but it's probably a good idea to limit yourself before loading time becomes a problem on slower connections.
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.
skydhash · 34m ago
You can do progressive enhancement too. JS enabled? Use ajax, show the form in a modal… JS not working? Fallback the standard browser navigation.
codingclaws · 2h ago
Couldn't agree more. I love text only pages/sites that have some style.
almostbasic · 1h ago
Agreed. 99% of the websites out there today are so loaded with images and videos that they would've taken 25 minutes to open on dial up.
tombert · 1h ago
I currently use Hugo with a fairly lightweight theme for my blog, which I like ok, but my stuff is primarily text and I’ve debated trying to find something even lighter.
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.
Picture can be ok with an alt text and proper link (not the background-image property) and you can always support ssr for the search page.
JCM9 · 1h ago
Web design has gotten too complicated. I really enjoy a simple site that focuses on content and readability vs fancy frameworks. There are sites still online from the 90s that looks better than much of the stuff produced today. Plus keeping it basic means your site will work well and look good forever.
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.
BugsJustFindMe · 2h ago
> Hosting text is so cheap
Hosting images is cheap too. GitHub will even do it for free!
kaycebasques · 2h ago
I have tried using a GitHub repo to host photos that I displayed on a different website. IIRC it didn't work great. I would try to access the photos over the raw GitHub URLs and I'm pretty sure they would often 404. Was I holding it wrong? Are there any great guides on this topic? I also remember that "uploading" photos over Git was a pain. Basically could only upload one at a time.
BugsJustFindMe · 1h ago
I meant using GitHub to host your whole site through gh-pages, not hotlinking to assets from some other unrelated server. You can even use your own domain.
guizadillas · 1h ago
I think they meant using github to host the page (with photos), not using github as a host for photos (iirc it isn't possible)
datadrivenangel · 2h ago
Hotlinking tends to be rough because people abuse github for free hosting. If the images are linked in a github page it usualkly works fine.
meken · 1h ago
I just paste a screenshot into a GitHub issue and use the link it gives me.
datadrivenangel · 2h ago
I think the beauty comes from the simplicity and focus. Many websites with a lot of things going on can also be beautiful because they're so focused.
The author seems to be conflating text-only with no-javascript. It's perfectly possible to make text-only webpages that exhibit all of the cancer and inconvenience of the modern web. In fact, most cookie consent popups are text-only.
mathiaspoint · 28m ago
Cookies themselves don't even need JavaScript.
m463 · 1h ago
I find it amusing that many text-only webpages emphasize it with a typewriter font.
> 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.
Y_Y · 45m ago
Fwiw, I work in an industry I've come to abhor (computer vision for security, often euphemised to "smart cities"). I hold my nose and wear my golden handcuffs reluctantly, and "technology transfer" FOSS into garbage products for incompetent middle managers by day, then talk shit about them at night to feel better.
Perhaps the author is in a similar situation?
albanbrooke · 42m ago
FWIW, we don't do any tracking with Buzzsprout Ads. We can tell you which podcasts accepted the ads, how many plays the episodes received, but we don't track the end user at all.
tyleo · 1h ago
I suspect they use this for two things:
1. Monospace which helps with formatting
2. Availability: I don’t think there are a whole lot of built-in monospace fonts
shahzaibmushtaq · 53m ago
How about making a complete website using only CSS1?
kh_hk · 2h ago
At some point we will have to get past the meta of blog posts about blog posts though.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
> 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 ;)
1vuio0pswjnm7 · 1h ago
I get every webpage as text-only
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.
Y_Y · 1h ago
I wish I could live like this, but I don't use the internet just for pleasure. There are things like buying flights, buying concert tickets, anything with a bank, etc. that require exactly the setup that the web developer had, lest the site explode.
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.
tombert · 1h ago
Which browser do you use? W3m? Elinks?
cosmicgadget · 2h ago
Maybe I see too many 16pt font powerpoints but I like images. Images don't require a cdn or cookie banner or javascript, there is ample daylight between text only and heavyweight.
Presumably you mean because with 19/20 of it being JavaScript that maxes out multiple processors to continually redraw graphics with only three words of text on the opening screen, it is the complete antithesis of what the headlined article talks about. (-:
a904guy · 42m ago
Guilty on the splash. Regardless the entire site is clean text, fast loads, no images, and no blockers.
In the author's own words:
> “So thank you to everybody who writes and publishes text-only webpages.”
busymom0 · 23m ago
I hope this was sarcasm. That website is the exact opposite.
jacknews · 2h ago
Text-only is fine, but why do you need to make it look like a page of typewriter output?
It kind of undermines the argument, and instead insists that the site looking like just a page of text is the important aspect.
jtlicardo · 16m ago
The fact that I cannot "unlike" the post at the bottom of the page is mildly infuriating.
tdhz77 · 2h ago
Will follow up with the beauty of readable fonts on text only webpages. I found this font of the blog hard to read.
delduca · 2h ago
All of my websites have zero JavaScript or cookies, loads on a blink.
hackerbeat · 2h ago
Agreed. And by the way, I really love the simplicity of https://wordgag.com/ (even though it has some ads on it).
rkagerer · 1h ago
That popup at the bottom is gross, and there's a whole screen worth of ads to scroll by as soon as you get rid of it.
I'm sorry but your page is a prime example of web enshittification. It's the kind of site I immediately move on from.
layer8 · 1h ago
I like text-only web pages, but please don’t use a monospace typeface.
cvoss · 1h ago
Different typefaces have different functions. If the goal is to be able to properly align/indent/space complex texts on a text-only site, a proportional font is not only ugly but actually unusable.
layer8 · 1h ago
I don’t think the article means to prohibit CSS (or tables) for layout. It is using text markup, and has a footer with CSS padding as well. Proportional fonts are perfectly compatible with aligning and indenting. Look at Craigslist for example.
macspoofing · 2h ago
Kinda slow when switching sections.
superkuh · 1h ago
It doesn't have to be text only. An html only webpage has all the same benefits. The real issue everyone has a problem with is javascript applications. The images and even multi-media in a static webpage made of html on HTTP/1.1 are not really the problem. Geocities sites had plenty of images and they were just as accessible as a 'text only' page/
revskill · 1h ago
Good luck rendering latex.
eppo999 · 2h ago
yes yes yes
dheera · 2h ago
> They're a refuge from the GDPR cookie banners
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.
artursapek · 2h ago
slop
ninetyninenine · 2h ago
I prefer images.
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.
wilkystyle · 2h ago
What images would you have preferred the author use in this blog post?
cosmicgadget · 2h ago
A picture of a text only post, obviously.
ninetyninenine · 2h ago
Like a youtube video where he narrates his whole idea with different cuts of his ideas in action.
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.
aniviacat · 2h ago
A significant issue with videos is that it's harder/impossible to skim them. Also, they don't allow for (accurate) quick search.
I'm optimistic we'll soon see some AI startup provide proper solutions to these issues. But until then I prefer text.
bccdee · 55m ago
Videos are good for passive consumption but terrible for active consumption. I can't skim or linger or jump back and forth at a glance.
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.
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.