Honorable mention: <a href="https://text.npr.org/" rel="nofollow">https://text.npr.org/</a><p>Not technically plaintext (in the MIME type sense), but still very lightweight, especially when compared to other news sites.
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
They're literally serving the content with a text/plain media type.<p>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.<p>(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 <i>have</i> stylesheets that could be thrown out-of-whack.)
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.<p>Thanks for putting together this list, it would be nice to add a short summary next to each link.
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.
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.
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.<p>".txt" is also a good idea for content-heavy pages. Maybe ".md" too? I may try.
I didn't know about the .text extension for Daring Fireball: <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/31/photoshop-1-and-the-early-macintosh-hig.text" rel="nofollow">https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/31/photoshop-1-and...</a><p>Interesting to see how the original creator of Markdown uses it.<p>I'm presuming that's the version he edits and not output automatically converted from an intermediary representation.
I think this site/list is more fitting: <a href="https://textonly.website/" rel="nofollow">https://textonly.website/</a>
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?)?<p>We've hardly scratched the surface here.<p>(Now I want to make a TUI site.)
I’m pondering on this functionality for static site builders that already say have some sort of Markdown to HTML Page pipeline.<p>For most SSG (Static site generators) I’ve seen that take a plain text to html conversion, they usually only serve up .html<p>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).<p>Am I missing something? Be a good idea/feature yeah?
Interesting. I've implemented naked CSS on my blog, which isn't quite the same:<p><a href="https://theandrewbailey.com/x-naked" rel="nofollow">https://theandrewbailey.com/x-naked</a>
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.
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.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20020329105739/http://berkshirehathaway.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20020329105739/http://berkshireh...</a>
Several years ago, I transitioned my Wordpress website to a static CSS/HTML only site, editing/updating it with vim and sftp <a href="https://chuck.is" rel="nofollow">https://chuck.is</a>. Overall, it's been a fantastic learning experience doing everything manually (though I plan to automate more soon). I was inspired by <a href="http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/" rel="nofollow">http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/</a>
Also there is gemini (real, not google's stolen name thing) and gopher. Gemini renders great on Cell Phones.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)</a>
Very interesting
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