Not technically plaintext (in the MIME type sense), but still very lightweight, especially when compared to other news sites.
Thanks for putting together this list, it would be nice to add a short summary next to each link.
(I've argued and lost that fight, more often than won it.)
This feels more "pure" to me, but it also means that you couldn't actually use it from a typical web browser. So it'd be utterly pointless, but then again, so is my blog.
I have a few WIP books where Markdown is my source format for similar reasons. I then use pandoc to render to txt, html, pdf, doc or epub as desired.
".txt" is also a good idea for content-heavy pages. Maybe ".md" too? I may try.
This redesign is only a few weeks old. Previously, only the homepage of my blog was HTML/CSS, the posts were all text files by default. Most (all?) people were frustrated with the mobile experience but I loved it. I only redesigned because I wanted to see images on my blog again. You can see the previous version in the 2025 branch[2] of my repo.
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Anyway, i'd like to mention the no HTML club: https://no-html.club/index.txt
Also self plug: https://txt.basilikum.monster You can also get the text version from basilkum.monster directly by sending the appropriate accept header.
Interesting to see how the original creator of Markdown uses it.
I'm presuming that's the version he edits and not output automatically converted from an intermediary representation.
This should be the version Gruber edits in MarsEdit or BBEdit, but it maybe partly rendered by the Moveable Type CMS
The extension is ‘.text’ because that is what he suggested as the Markdown extension, but of course most of us went with ‘.md’
While keyword tags are not used on the website, you can see the one he uses for his personal purposes at the bottom of the Markdown
URLs are text. Anchor tags are text. The "link" part is a function of the content viewer. text/plain just happens to not trigger that function in most browsers, but there's no guarantee it won't. If I paste that plain text into an email, it's likely my client or the the receiver's is going to "linkify" it.
For my textsites, I use the whole address, e.g., http://ynac.freeshell.org/Yuengling.txt and will often repeat the instruction to right-click on any link to follow. That way, navigation is strong and layout just that much more challenging.
It's clearly intentional, but I just can't think of a reason to intentionally make your website this unusable?
Mine defaulted to drunk for some reason and it's so horrible I didn't even realise I could change it!
We've hardly scratched the surface here.
(Now I want to make a TUI site.)
I never knew Google invented the Zodiac.
https://web.archive.org/web/20020329105739/http://berkshireh...
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.
If your browser is rendering plaintext documents in a way that's unreadable, that's a failure of your web browser to serve as an effective user agent for your needs.
(People shoot down the analogous argument for changing the base formatting of text/html, because changing the base UA styles would throw brittle old stylesheets out of whack. But plaintext doesn't have stylesheets that could be thrown out-of-whack.)
For most SSG (Static site generators) I’ve seen that take a plain text to html conversion, they usually only serve up .html
Wondering out loud if this would be a useful and desirable addition for SSG tools to have the option to serve up say .html and a .md (or .txt or whatever).
Am I missing something? Be a good idea/feature yeah?
The only thing you might be missing: I don't think it helps many people really.
I personally still like the feature because I put my website under a free software license and then it is only fitting that you could view the actual source code. Having the `.md` next to the `.xhtml` available helps to achieve this.
