Originally published at: Google News without the bloated design | Boing Boing
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Sometimes, I miss those days. I don’t miss the dialing in and the slow downloads, but I do miss the simple design and lack of bloatware and flashing ads and misleading clickbait disguised as “news” and “One Weird Trick” nonsense.
The days you crafted a web page by writing HTML on Notepad.
Get off my lawn.
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I tried to like it but I don’t miss the days of text only websites. I miss the days of the ease of writing those web pages compared to today where everything has to look good on every device but reading text only, nope, hard pass.
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Don’t you(all) have terminals in which to type: w3m https://news.google.com ? or, instead of w3m: lynx, links2, elinks. Or straight out of emacs with eww (“best” terminal browsers currently) Sure ya do! boingboing visitors are mostly jolly ooold nerds, aren’t you? (“Well, ‘oold’ if not ‘ooold’”)
Perhaps what’s wanting is a firefox add-on to open a tab with the output run of lynx … s’gotta be a way.
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One for, one against. I’ll split the difference and say “why not both?” We really need more sites that allow flexibility in how users can experience the data. It’s more work for the designers and programmers, but would be great for consumers. With style sheets, there’s no reason a site HAS to look one way, it could look different ways depending on which style sheet is chosen (but perhaps my knowledge of HTML and CSS is too limited to understand why a website viewer can’t switch style sheets on the fly… I can do it with my personal webmail setup, though, so I suspect it’s just because organizations don’t want the hassle of maintaining multiple style sheets).
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I switched to newsnow.com when G. revamped the design of their news page.
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Oh, I’m not talking text only. Best case is simple HTML with quick-loading graphics. Back in the days before everything was monetized.
A friend of mine writes a blog about stupid comics. Low tech, simple design, very funny. He’s since added one ad (OK, server space ain’t free), but it’s otherwise pretty much '90s tech.
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The layout of Google News is impressively clean, has barely changed (to my recollection) in a decade, and works without javascript.
Websites should support text browsing, but removing the CSS here is a step backward.
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Nice. Adding this to my list. I love it.
My go-to text news sites are:
news.ycombinator.com
lite.cnn.io
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I won’t pretend to understand how all the pretty magic is done, but when the text of an article I want to read is less than 1k in size but the page contains over 200MB of crap to display it, we got a problem.
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I firefox, you can switch to plain text with a simple click of a button in the address bar. Near the end of the address bar is an icon that looks like ic could be word processing document. It is the switch to plain text. 
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your standing at the mouth of a cave and it’s raining all around…
is a line of a text game that I used to play at… not with because there were
no images… .jpegs pictures what have you…
I like the idea, but I still can’t escape their too-aggressive targeting algorithm. I looked up that Gonzaga basketball game ONE TIME, I do not need additional in-depth coverage every time I check the news. Does anyone know how to clear that data out? I can hide stories and then select to ‘see less of’ a topic, but I’d prefer to clear out the positive attachments to topics, rather than creating new negative ones and just blacklisting Gonzaga forever.
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