+++ Saturday  3 January 2026 +++

Text-only websites
==================

In addition to the HTML formatted posts, the blog of Terence Eden
started a couple of years also serving the posts in plain text.

Yesterday Terence Eden published a blog post titled
"A small collection of text-only websites" [1].

The blog post lists some examples-links to a number of other
websites that can also be browsed in text only mode.
This is a nice idea, we all love plain text.

Plain text pages
----------------
A big advantage of the plain text pages is the signal/noise ratio.

Normally, HTML formatted pages contains headers, with metadata like
the title, perhaps elements like language, link to an RSS file, some
CSS-code or a link to a CSS file, and so on. Visitors expect to find
some navigational links. The possibility to add some JavaScript is
tempting. All in all, compared to simple plain text, formatting in
HTML adds overhead that results in a heavier page (composed of more
bytes).

Offering plain text pages also helps to raise awareness of the
advantage of plain text, the simplicity of it, and that the extra
bloat of HTML is often not really necessary.

The initiative, to offer the same content in plain text, can therefor
only be praised.

WYSIWIG
-------
Plain text is the only real what-you-see-is-what-you-get format.

PDF comes close too. Every other format requires some rendering by
the browser. A Gemini formatted page has long lines, but most
browsers wrap these into paragraphs.

When opening the links in the list of examples mentioned in the blog
post, a few things stand out.

- The text mode pages are formatted in Markdown or at least look like
  Markdown
- Some pages show a lot of Markdown formatted links.
- Most of pages contain very long lines.
- Only one shows TLC for readability.

Gopher is better
----------------
I support the initiative of adding plain text versions of HTML-pages
to a website.

But for reading plain text pages, I still prefer Gopher.

People who publish on Gopher also visit Gopher pages and are aware
of the end result. I suppose that is why in the Gopher sphere most
people take care of the readability of their pages.

But who knows, perhaps websites with plain text pages can help
raise interest in Gopher ...

[1]: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites/


Last edited: $Date: 2026/01/03 09:05:02 $