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This entirely depends on your perspective/interpretation of “text-only”.

To me, having only text as the output with no ads, videos, or images is “text-only”. It doesn’t matter how it’s presented as long as it’s just text.

But I also see your perspective. You want plain defaults with white background color, black foreground color, and no formatting.


This thread is about text the MIME type. It’s not a subjective definition.

> The rules are simple - content which has the MIME type of text/plain. No HTML, no multimedia, no RTF, no XML, no ANSI colour escape sequences.

Your definition is fine for you, but it’s not what TFA is about.


I feel like the article should've been called "plaintext-only websites" or something, because if you had asked me I would've also defined "text-only" as image/video-less websites

I struggle with the purity of meaning for text-only as well. Before this thread, I didn't understand the mime settings; I've been living a lie with a browser friendly landing page that uses:

<!DOCTYPE HTML><plaintext>

And then all the other pages of the site to be pure *.txt files. In the end, until there are standards to point to, I just accept minimalism as the scale. I have ads, layouts, boxes / frames, and all sorts of possibly annoying aspects to my textsites. It is a medium that's just as easily abused as any!


"No arbitrary code execution" is how I'd put it. "Ads" can be plain text, they just usually aren't on the internet. If a plain text site decided to include them once in a while, I'd celebrate the choice.

It’s more so that “text” in this case refers to “text (.txt) file” rather than “letters and numbers”

It's like my journalism professor told me since he used to be a news anchor ... "If it bleeds, it leads".



I've been waiting for someone to mention this just to check how many older designers/devs are here.


Also, thanks to @dang for keeping the community in-line with the rules/guidelines.


@dang is far and away the best community manager / moderator I've personally seen or interacted with on the internet. Nothing is ever black and white, but he makes managing that look easy. Huge respect.


Dang is great!

Btw, Scott Alexander also does a pretty good job.


I wish. But thanks!


My list of "greatest all time community-runners" is pretty short, and I'm having a hard time thinking of anyone I'd put ahead of you.


As an ultimate service to newsboards all over, dang should consider writing a book at some point distilling all his thoughts, practices, advice, lessons learnt.


+1


nah its true, this is one of the few places left on the web thats friendly and thoughtful (most of the time at least). That is directly related to your work keeping things civil. thank you


Yes, thank you @dang. HN wouldn't be HN without you.


Echo this!

Somewhere in the multiverse a universe exists with HN died a horrible death because Dang made alternative life choices.


Hell yeah !


I ended up turning my TV off and watching from my phone because of the buffering/freezing. The audio would continue to play and the screen would be frozen with a loading percentage that never changed.

I have Spectrum (600 Mbps) for ISP and Verizon for mobile.


Physics Girl on YouTube is still fighting it.

https://www.youtube.com/@physicsgirl


I do wonder how much of this is self-fulfilling atrophy. You're tired and sick, so you stay in bed. Then you get weak, making you more tired. Hopefully she can turn things around, regardless of underlying causes.


It sounds like for cases like hers, trying and pushing yourself to exercise only makes you weaker, not stronger. If you're curious, her channel has a number of videos about this.


I'll check that out.

I know when I'm recovering from an illness I need to push myself a bit to regain energy. But it also makes sense that its not a universal experience.


Yeah, she was so active and productive and engaging as a youtube content creator. She is one of my favorites! So it's just stunning to see how profound whatever is happening for her is. She went from bright and engaging to basically a state of profound depression (I mean this in a physical sense.)

Hopefully she finds out the whole picture some day, makes a recovery, and will do an extensive retrospective.



The last one is quite perfect indeed, others are overdesigned and too specific in their styles that look dated now.


It isn't perfect; it is even worse (unless CSS is disabled; I often disable CSS due to the excessive and undesirable CSS in web pages (which sometimes makes it very slow, but even if it doesn't, it doesn't look very good)). The original is better.

> Shit’s finally lightweight and loads fast;

The original does it better. (If JavaScripts are enabled, then the <script> command might make it slower but you can omit that. Fortunately, this "perfect" one does omit the <script>, at least.)

> Finally fits on all your shitty screens;

Not very well. With a small window size, the font is too big and it doesn't fit. With a big window size, it wastes space. The original, without CSS, allows it to fit to the window size appropriately.

> Finally looks the same in all your shitty browsers;

It is better not to; it should look correct in all of the browsers but that does not mean that it should look the same. User preferences, considerations having to do with the display (e.g. mono vs colours), available fonts, accessibility, computer types, etc, can and should make it different, and the author of the document should not have to worry about most of this (as long as minimal accessibility tags are included where necessary; see below about the HTML lang attribute).

> Won’t bleach your fucking eyeballs at night if your browser thinks you like dark things;

The use of CSS means that it is necessary to make this consideration. Omitting CSS makes this unnecessary.

> The motherfucker’s still accessible to every asshole that visits your site;

Due to the redirection of "http:" to "https:", it isn't.

> Shit’s still legible and gets your fucking point across.

Let the reader decide what is "legible".

> I know you love marginalization, but you should take care of people. The HTML tag doesn’t include the lang attribute in your shitty webpage.

This is a valid point; there are benefits of specifying the language.

> Don’t let improper marks and quotes make their way onto websites because of dumb defaults in applications and CMSs.

The ASCII quotations marks are good enough for most purposes, and are also more portable. However, if you do not want to use them, OK; at least you added a <meta charset> command in this case (which is relevant for this one, so it is appropriate to be included; but the <meta charset> command is superfluous in the original).

> And did you let the browser choose the font? Don’t make me read such text with Times New Roman.

I hope you do let the browser choose the font, according to the font installed by the user. Don't make me read such text with needing to download additional fonts that I don't want.

> And as you’ll never be perfect, let others improve your shit or do what the fuck they want to.

OK.


Wow! I’m just a normal person here. Could someone explain how that’s making the sound from the AM station like it’s a speaker?


The audio signal is encoded in AM signal by effectively multiplying a high-frequency "carrier" signal (like a 1.4 MHz sine wave) with the amplitude of the audio signal (some squiggles that match the air pressure waves we perceive as sound, around 0-20 KHz).

As a result, the peak of the voltage on the tower is changing with rise and fall of the audio signal. And that peak voltage change is changing the spark in some way that makes it get hotter or cooler really fast (or something), which causes the air that is getting zapped to expand and contract, resulting in an air pressure wave that is relative to the original audio.

There's probably a pile of distortion due to all of the physics of the arc (high frequencies seem louder), but humans are pretty good at hearing the human voice through all of that anyways.


Title seems oddly similar to another Reddit-like post from today….

Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years (https://non.io)


Of course, that makes complete sense considering reddit is having a blackout for the next two days so people are hoping to capitalize on the turmoil. Definitely the best time to launch a competitor though they have a very steep hill to climb!


Title seems oddly similar to another “Reddit-like” post from today!

Show HN: FlingUp, a Reddit-like platform Ive been building for the last 2 years (https://flingup.com)


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