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I’m not saying the plain-text is the best web experience. But it is an experience. Perfect if you like your browsing fast, simple, and readable. There are no cookie banners, pop-ups, permission prompts, autoplaying videos, or garish colour schemes.
I’m certainly not the first person to do this, so I thought it might be fun to gather a list of websites which you browse in text-only mode.
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Terence Eden’s maintaining a list of websites that are presented as, or are wholly or partially available via, plain text. Obviously my own text/plain blog is among them, and is as far as I’m aware the only one to be entirely presented as text/plain.
Anyway, this inspired me to write a post of my own (on text/plain blog, of course!), in which I ask the question: what do we consider plain text? Based on the sites in the list, Markdown is permissible as plain text, (for the purposes of Terence’s list), but this implies that “plain text” is a spectrum of human-readability.
If Markdown’s fine, then presumably Gemtext would be too? How about BBCode? HTML and RTF are explicitly excluded by Terence’s rules, but I’d argue that HTML 1.0 could be more human-readable than some of the more-sophisticated dialects of BBCode (or any Markdown that contains tables, unless those tables are laid-out in a way that specifically facilitates human-readability)?
As I say in my post:
<-- More human-readable Less human-readable --> |-----------|-----------|-----------|------------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------| Plain text Gemtext Markdown BBCode HTML 1.0 Modern HTML RTF
This provocation is only intended to get you to think about “what does it mean for a markup language to be ‘human readable’?” Where do you draw the line?
I *think* that I mean “Not interpreted by the browser”. An HTML 1 page is pretty human readable, but most web-browsers will parse the page and render it – for example turning the ul-li into a list.
I don’t know of a browser which turns Markdown *italics* into actual slanted text. (Although I have seen some MD pages which include JS to do just that!)
So, I’d argue that plain-text means that it is presented in the browser in an identical manner to if it were opened in a text editor.
Pretty solid definition.
Although… a browser shouldn’t interpret any HTML (etc.) in a page if the Content-Type: header isn’t set to text/html or similar. A website that accepts ?format=text and merely sets “Content-Type: text/plain” (making the browser to show the HTML source code rather than rendering the HTML) would meet the requirement.
It turns out that the definition is… perhaps necessarily… pretty fuzzy. I guess it’s a “Duck test”/”Potter Stewart test” area!