FRESH
Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker NewsMore listed at https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites
It’d be great if there was some standard that allowed these to be easily found, and supported on the local news sites.
- AT&T was completely down for us but Verizon and its MVNOs were up
- I had a Verizon MVNO secondary e-sim that came free with a home internet plan, unused until the hurricane hit
- It worked pretty well!
- The day the Verizon disaster internet trucks showed up at the police station in our town my Verizon MVNO internet went down
Non-internet learnings:
- Fill up your vehicle’s fuel or battery before any big storm, we spent a lot of time siphoning and otherwise consolidating fuel to get ourselves and neighbors out of town, particularly because we didn’t know how far we’d have to go to find a gas station with electricity
In fact, for a long time web forums were largely entirely usable without JS.
See the degradation of GitHub for a great example. You used to be able to interact with most of it without any JS at all; browsing the code repositories, reading and replying to issues, etc. Now it barely shows anything without JS. Of course, I suspect in that case it's deliberate so they can trick you into running a few more tracking and analytics scripts...
This was the case when I got a Rapberry Pi 4 with 1GB of RAM about late 2019. You could run one tab of Chrome, but any more and it would be killed.
(1) https://log.schemescape.com/posts/hardware/farewell-to-a-net...
For Hurricane Helene specifically, my team at Newspack actually worked with Blue Ridge Public Radio and a number of other news organizations in the affected area to set up text versions of their websites for low bandwidth readers[1] and get info to 10s of thousands of people[2].
In fact, it was so successful (maybe not at reaching you specifically though), that we got a grant to roll out a general purpose plain text web solution for breaking news situations to news organizations across the country![3] So I think there may have been a mismatch in that you didn't know about all of the plain text versions of news sites available in your area during the disaster -- that's something we'll have to keep in mind.
[2] https://awards.journalists.org/entries/hell-or-high-water-bp...
- I got caught in the mountains for a few days due to landslides in Nepal. The only available information was relayed by phone between locals. People had no idea of what was going on and their vacation ended on the day the road reopened. It caused a pile up of cars where the road had slid off a few days prior. In some parts, rocks still fell from the cliffs above. We flagged a passing car and asked them to keep us updated on WhatsApp instead. We could have all stayed put if we had that information before.
- During covid I maintained a page with simplified local restrictions and a changelog of new restrictions. The alternative was to follow press conferences and re-read the entire regulation the next day, or keep checking the newspapers. Mine was just a bullet list at a permanent location.
- During the invasion of Ukraine, refugees have set up the most impressive ad hoc information network I have ever seen. It was operational in 24 hours and kept improving for weeks. People sorted out routes, transport, border issues, accommodation, translation and supplies over Telegram, Notion and Google Docs.
Information propagation is critical during emergencies, and people are really bad at it. Setting up a simple website and two-way communication channels makes a huge difference.
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Some Topic</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Some Topic</h1>
<p>Information goes here.</p>
<p>Information goes here.</p>
<p>Information goes here.</p>
</body>
</html>
If you decide to add an off-the-shelf wad of CSS, like Pico.css, consider hosting it alongside your HTML (rather than turning it into another third-party dependency and CDN cross-site surveillance tracker). Minified, and single-request.
As a web developer, I am thinking again about my experience with the mobile web on the day after the storm, and the following week.
I remember trying in vain to find out info about the storm damage and road closures—watching loaders spin and spin on blank pages until they timed out trying to load.
This very article loaded 2.49MB (uncompressed) over 30 requests. It's served using Next.js (it does actually load fine with JS disabled).
Ironically this is a great opportunity for the author to have made a stronger point. It could have gone beyond the abstract desire of "going back to basics" to perhaps demo reworking itself to be served using plain HTML and CSS without any big server-side frameworks.
Our best source of information, even after we started to get a bit of service, was an inReach. I messaged a friend far from the region and asked them really specific questions like, "Tell me when I can get from our house to I-26 and then south to South Carolina."
Yes, absolutely, emergency information sites should be as light as possible. And satellite devices are incredibly useful when everything local goes down.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231208000921/https://10kbclub....
I find that the sites designed around being small are usually nice to read since the effort is put in the content not the layout.
Additionally a lot of great sites can be found through something like https://wiby.me/ or different protocols like gopher or gemini.
Local copies of important information on your mobile device. Generally your laptops are not going to see much use. Mobile apps tend to fake local data and store lots of things to the cloud. We tend to ignore such things like backups and local copies nowadays. Most of the time we can get away without any worry here but consider keeping a copy of things like medications and their non commercial names for situations like this as well.
[1] https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-... [2] https://crukorg.github.io/engineering-guidebook/docs/fronten...
That bulleted newsletter list being the most useful thing says everything.
Many years ago, Google had a service I would use pre-Smartphone days to search when I was away from the PC and needed info for like a restaurant’s number. You would text 46645 and it would send you search results. It was useful during hurricanes.
What saved us from a news deficit after Helene was that we had 2 portable AM/FM radios. Both of the radios took batteries and one of them you could even charge via a hand crank. I highly recommend having a portable AM/FM radio of some kind. Blue Ridge Public Radio (our local NPR) was amazing during this time. Their offices are located right in downtown, which never lost power, so they were able to keep operating immediately after the storm.
I also feel this pain of bloated sites taking forever to load when I'm traveling. I'm on an old T-Mobile plan that I've had since around 2001 that comes with free international roaming in 215+ countries. The only problem is that it's a bit throttled. I know that I could just buy a prepaid SIM, or now I can use an eSIM vendor like Saily, but I'm too cheap and/or the service is just good enough that I'm willing to wait the few extra seconds. Using Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin helps some, but not enough (also I just switched to iPhone last month). I've definitely been on websites that take forever to load because there's just so much in the initial payload, sometimes painfully slow. I don't think enough developers are testing their sites using the throttling options in the dev tools.
*4KB webpage files*
So a website where each page does not exceed 4KB. This includes whatever styling and navigation needed. Surprisingly you can share a lot of information even with such constraints. Bare bone html is surprisingly compact and the browser already does a whole lot of the heavy lifting.
Why 4KB? Because that used to be the default page size in x86 hardware. So you can grab the whole thing in one chunk.
This whole comment is not 1KB.
In some villages, where plenty of stone is available, people used it for everything - roof slabs, pillars, walls, flooring, water storage bowls etc. Also, villages which had plenty of wood around, they used it for everything.
As techies, we say there is an app for everything, or there is a web-technology for everything. When you have a hammer in hand, everything looks like a nail.
1. Identify core functionality. 2. Make that functionality available using the simplest technology. 3. Enhance!
Restaurant websites mentioned — the majority of restaurant web sites I’ve encountered were much more annoying and difficult to read than a PDF, even on a small phone screen. Or should I say, especially on a small phone screen. Some would make a 32 inch monitor feel cramped.
Another endlessly frustrating aspect is unfortunately Facebook. For better or worse, it's become a hub of emergency information using local facebook groups. In an emergency you want a feed of chronological information and facebook insists on engaging you by showing 'relevant' posts out of order.
This initial map style would be the equivalent of a "text-only" website.
Blocked by Vercel's turbopack bundle analyzer's bugs though, because before optimizing the tiles, I need to optimize the JS that loads the tiles.
I haven't figured a way to load a Maplibre map server side, so the JS must be ready before the map starts to get loaded.
I'm sure there are more proxies around.
I built this repo as a Helene response repo, trying to use an llm to help get resources over text message. https://github.com/realityinspector/supply_drop_ai
wonder if you could get to news over sms, use an llm to compress to minimum viable text?
The web could in theory support text-first content, but it won't. The Gemini protocol, though not perfect, was built to avoid extensibility that inevitably leads us away from text. I long for the day more bloggers make their content available on Gemspace, the way we see RSS as an option on some blogs.
The web will continue to stray from text-first content because it is too easy to add things that are not text.
I think with a little effort they could make it pretty frictionless for their users who it turn would be happy to provide it.
But the progressive, text first loading, would be readable from the get go, even if further downloads stalled.
Give me a minimal / plain text website every day, it's not just the link speed.
Truly a sign of our times
The fact that he was struck by such an evident truth means that he is (hopefully: was) part of the problem.
<html> <pre> TEXT </pre> </hml>
The mobile internet technically worked during a big storm some time back but barely. Half-loaded pages. The images were suspended. JS took too long. Most websites were only usable in theory.
The best ones shared some pattern. They;re not random.
Simplified Design.
word first
Avoid complicated client-side logic.
Quick in rendering even on a poor connection.
It has prompted me to think about a straightforward framework. The order of occurrence of different circumstances
Most of us design products for the first two. It is the third one where things break down.
There were some practical things, that helped me in those moments.
A server-rendered page must still read well when JavaScript is disabled.
The content must load before any decorative element.
A clear hierarchy, even without styling.
There is no important information hidden beneath the interactions.
Interested in the thoughts of others.
Do you deliberately design for suboptimal conditions?
Do you have a definition of “minimum usable version?” ~
> 5.1 MB transferred
Ironic.