If you aim is to help people who want pure text-based interfaces (the blind in particular), this is much worse than a proper HTML page, which they can easily explore by headers. Well-formed HTML is actually one of the most accessible formats, and drawing boxes with CSS (rather than ASCII art) is also much better, as a screen reader would try to read the art, and get confused by boxes next to each other.
Why are we assigning motives to creations where none is stated? ASCII art loads fast and the miniscule stylesheet and script barely slows anything down.
Plenty of people who aren't disabled like minimalist interfaces, because minimalist interfaces tend to stay relatively static.
Plus, in this case, the main utility seems to be that there's a single place you can check the results of any mainstream sports event, rather than going through the million hoops to get search engines to give you a page where you can find results.
Plain text is good because it
1. Loads fast 2. Can be parsed easily
<table>s load just as fast, and can be parsed much faster by humans and computers alike.
Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it correctly. This is all costs of markup without any benefit. Bring accessibility in the mix (which we should always do) and it's a non-starter.
Says who? The owner of the website here owes us nothing.
A person can just make something for their own enjoyment. It's not the end of the world.
To be clear, regardless of the HTML layout, I do like this site, because I can quickly and easily check NHL scores and standings without the cruft that comes from most sporting websites.
For me, not supporting some kind of sorting natively makes them not perfect. It's really important for me when reading tabular data to have that option.
Do other users who depend on screen readers have an experience they’re willing to share about visiting this site?
The main limitation is it would be nice if the sections were labelled, either with a <hx>, or <section>, to make it easier to jump around the page.
The ascii art gets read, which is a bit annoying, aria-hidden="true" will make the ascii art not get read out as text.
The best option is to try out with a screen reader -- on both windows + mac a decent screen reader is built in (it's worth best with the default browser, safari on mac, edge on windows). I'm not expert on screen reading on Linux.
And I did try to use Orca but I just could not get it to work, the TTS service was sulkily disinclined to accept any requests.
I realise that doesn't help Linux/BSD users.
The problem is that in this page's case all of the decorative text like borders will be "read out" as well.
It sounds as though the author has not actually asked vision-impaired users.
And of course audio is not only for vision-impaired users.
I can play audio directly from a webpage at 5-10x speed easily, but I use the command line programs like ffmpeg/mplayer/mpv/vlc, not a browser like Chrome.
Assuming a Google employee's belief reflects what all web users actually prefer (doubtful!), websites could offer a variety of audio with the same TTS voices that screen readers use.
Some news websites, for example Bloomberg, have been including audio files for years. Wikipedia also offers audio files created with TTS.
But I find this quite funny, while it is obviously going for a plain-text appearance it actually uses javascript and a lot of "complex" CSS like flexbox making it actually scale nicely to different size screens once the max-width is removed. But if the implementation is actually using these complex features why target a plain-text look? Maybe it is a personal preference but for me simple line borders are a lot less noisy and distracting than +------+.
The advent of good browser-based zooming has made non-default font-size users like yourself a small segment. The days of having to author everything in em/rem is mostly over – keeping everything scalable was tedious and prone to issues.
I'd bet you encounter issues regularly: explicit font sizes on a root element are a ubiquitous practice. Examples include HN itself, Google, MDN, Apple, etc.
That being said, 13px is quite small. I'd encourage at least a 16px minimum. But for now, simply zoom in with Cmd/Ctrl-+
> non-default font-size users like yourself
What does this even mean? The default font is being overridden and irreverent here. Are you suggesting that there is a default default font that is expected to be used across all browsers?
Yes, the `font-size` value when you freshly install the browser: 16px. This changeable value had a lot of historical importance, as it was the only way users could scale sites up.
Good Samaritan CSS authors had to write not only all font-sizes in percentages or em's to respect that value (rem came later) but also think about things like min/max-widths, padding/margin, breakpoints, etc. Folks would later use pixel-to-em converter functions in early tools like Bourbon and Compass. You can still find old polemics on authoring explicit pixel values from folks like Jakob Nielsen[0].
These days, Cmd-+ in browsers zooms instead of scales font-size, and things just work out nicely: padding and margins magically grow, breakpoints trigger as expected, etc. As a result, direct font-size adjustments have gone from living in the taskbar in IE4 to being buried in Google Chrome in Preferences > Appearance > Font Size.
In my opinion, it's for the best. Users aren't left out in the cold by nonconforming CSS, and CSS devs don't have to do battle with scalable values.
[0] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/let-users-control-font-size...
Yes – 16px times new roman.
Almost everything overrides the default font size because almost every browser has a default of 16px, while almost every desktop OS uses a UI font of <13px.
Chrome: Settings > Appearance > Page zoom
Firefox: Settings > General > Zoom
iOS Safari: Settings > Safari > Page Zoom > Other Websites
Seems like this isn't actually plaintext (as in the mimetype `text/plain`), but is instead just "minimalist-aesthetic sports" (with the caveat that for some reason there's CSS styling to make the font unreadably small at 2560x1440, which was what led me to try `curl` in the first place, assuming that since it'd be plaintext, I could just get the data in plaintext without any extra CSS formatting making it hard to read).
$ curl -X GET https://plaintextsports.com/ -H 'Accept: text/plain' | head
<html translate="no">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="google" content="notranslate" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no">
<title>Plain Text Sports</title>
Swedish state television (SVT) still provide "Text-TV" online at https://www.svt.se/text-tv -- many Swedes including myself still know some of the numbers by heart, 100 being the index and 377 being the favorite page of dads all over the country (live sports results).
I vividly remember being a kid (before DSL broadband or even dial-up was a thing in my life) flipping through the pages and guessing numbers between 100 and 999 to see where I would end up, long before I would end up doing the same thing on the early Internet.
SVT's "Text-TV" is to my knowledge still the worlds oldest, operational service of its kind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_teletext_services says “The Netherlands has run a regular Teletext service since the end of 1977 on the public broadcasting channels”. That would make that older. Ceefax was from 1974, so it seems there’s room for an even older still operating one.
edit: According to this site[2] the Dutch teletext was broadcast "on the open network" on April 1, 1980. There's also a Swedish source claiming that Swedish Text-TV is the oldest in the world.[3]
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20032882
[2]: https://over-nos-nl.translate.goog/organisatie/geschiedenis-...
[3]: https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/1216116 "idag har faktiskt Sverige världens äldsta ännu aktiva Text-TV"
EDIT: After inspecting the HTML, I think Plain Text Sports is a bit of a misnomer. With that name, I might have expected a lot of <pre> tags in the markup, but there are no none to be found. Instead, CSS is used for the layout, even line breaks. So, Hypertext Sports?
Looks like a single page app.
$ curl plaintextsports.com
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left SpeedOnly constructive feedback would be if it can better fill a normal 16:9 desktop monitor - it looks optimized for mobile, which is great - but it's too small and narrow for keeping open on the PC
If you like MLB - this reminds me of Playball which runs in the terminal.
Sites like NHL.com or ESPN.com are borderline hostile navigating this info.
It is reminiscent of the morning sports pages in the newspaper I would read each morning as a kid.
The one improvement would be if there was page that summarized the league. i.e. Click on NHL and it lists scores, games that day, standings, and possibly scoring leaders. That would be capture all of the important points on one clean page, as the newspaper used to.
Unfortunately, in order for me to avoid that hell, I use the mobile app and wish I didn't have to.
<head><meta name="referrer" content="origin"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="news.css?QZejSKY7mNWXnObVdaSN">
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico">
<title>Submissions from plaintextsports.com | Hacker News</title></head>[0]: http://www.espn.com/apis/devcenter/blog/read/publicretiremen...
It's a "private" API for their website, but like I said it's been around for a while and using it in a hobby app isn't going to be an issue. Using it commercially is just begging for trouble, though.
I started building Plain Text Sports last year when I was watching an NFL playoff game in rural southwest Wisconsin. We had poor TV reception -- the image was going in-and-out -- and the local radio station was mostly static. I tried to check ESPN, but the loading bar was as frozen as the ground outside. I then had the idea for a website designed for the pure sports fan: no ads, no images, just scores, play-by-play and stats, with a simple information-dense display.
I initially added support for the NBA so I could follow my beloved Milwaukee Bucks. I posted it to /r/nba, got over 600 upvotes in a few hours, and got perma-banned for self-promotion. (I did a Show HN too, but it didn't take off. [1]) Over the following months I added NHL, MLB, NFL, college basketball and football, and added standings and team schedules so it could really be a one-stop-shop for my sporting needs. Just this past month I added MLS and NWSL (National Women's Soccer League). I plan on adding the WNBA and the Premier League later this year too.
Obviously I designed the site with minimalism and efficiency in mind, as a reaction to the bloated web we see today. We don't need heaps of JavaScript just to display a bit of text, nor do we need half-a-dozen sites tracking our "engagement", and our "retention". People just want to get the information they're looking for, as fast as possible. Technology shouldn't get in the way.
Despite the austere presentation, I'm really proud of the design of the site. As a commenter noted, it's not actually plain text, but does use some CSS and a tiny bit of JavaScript (sue me!). But there are a lot of small details that I put a lot of effort into: the game times on the front page automatically show up in your local time zone, and the boxes automatically expand to fit long time-zones. For the NBA, the raw play-by-play data I get is very granular. A steal, for example, is both a turnover by the offensive player, and a steal for the defensive player, but I combine those into a single event in the timeline. For the NFL, I draw an ASCII drawing of the field showing the progress of the most recent play [2]. When a team wins a championship, they get an ASCII trophy and a dedicated spot on the front-page for the next week. It's been really fun trying to figure out how to pack as much information as possible into a 45 column-wide display.
A streamer I watch on Twitch [3] who does marketing at Nvidia also had a competition amongst his viewers to make their own ads, and that led me down another rabbit hole of fun "plain-text" videos. [4][5][6].
Plain Text Sports also led to my next project. I get a lot of data from publicly accessible, but undocumented JSON APIs, and it was frustrating digging through giant JSON files trying to understand how certain situations were represented. That led me to build jless [7], a command-line JSON viewer, which made it to the front page last month.
[1]: Original Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310314
[2]: ASCII football field: https://twitter.com/CodeIsTheEnd/status/1436003783327293452
[3]: Atrioc, Nvidia marketing streamer: https://twitch.tv/atrioc
[4]: Never Miss Moment Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t1qY0vOJWc
[5]: Bucks Championship Run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WHcP4PTBHY
[6]: Wisconsin Sports Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLsm0MirOEg
[7]: jless, a command-line JSON viewer: https://jless.io
Question: why not use a proportional font for all things other than the score? It would make readability much better. Is the output being mapped to individual character widths, that's why?
EDIT: One more question, is there a URL I can share that enables dark mode? e.g. https://plaintextsports.com/?mode=dark
It also has the added benefit that the "+" and the "---" align (I only mention this because I noticed the system monospace font on macOS does not align at the box score border "+----")
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Nanum+Gothic+Coding?catego...
I’ve actually considered building a similar type of site for a while but wasn’t sure how to get the real-time sports score updates.
Do you have to pay for that data?
Even if you don't follow sports that much (like me), it's also a great way to browse news in general – without any clutter or clickbait, as the technology is so restricted. I've noticed it's so much easier to avoid doomscrolling traps compared to regular websites, especially during the latest global horrors.
As long as you are only interested in certain very large sports teams. (She has no idea there are any minor league baseball teams.)
But at least if you ask for a score and the game hasn't started yet, she's smart enough to tell you the time it starts, rather than giving you the scores for yesterday's game. Though, maybe she should do both for completeness.
25 year younger me would have loved this site for that. :)
https://justmta.info/ has it all on one page.
Always wished for one with play-by-play
For a reverse proxy, you would want a computer capable of the encryption methods the modern web's security standards demand and to install a web server on it which you can access from the older computer. The server computer does not have to be fancy at all. A Raspberry Pi can do it. For software I would recommend either Caddy (https://caddyserver.com/docs/quick-starts/reverse-proxy) or NGINX (https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/web-server/reverse-...). It can be rather complicated and difficult for someone to do, especially if you're not a web programmer.
If both that and upgrading your computer aren't in the cards at the moment, I would think using the recently-discontinued browser Classilla is your best bet: http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ It at least supports some deprecated forms of TLS & SSL. I hear there's a fork called Phoenix that kind of supports TLS 1.2 even.
(I would recommend using the most updated browser regardless.)