Maybe one of my favorite examples

https://plaintextsports.com/

Another well known one and particularly interesting since it's one of the most valuable companies in the world and this is their real website and not something they've just kept for historical purposes or something. https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

I would pay good money to watch a clear-glasses-framed youngster pitch Buffet on turning the BH website into a progressive web app.

Lots of examples here (although many do have some amount of styling): https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html

I've always wanted to create a blog "platform" that's just plaintext or markdown files in a git repo hosted over a torrent-like network. By publishing, you automatically sign every post (commit) with a key, the fingerprint which can be used for lookup on a DHT. By "following" a blog, you're just cloning the git repo from peers and hosting it like a torrent. Things like fonts and colors get sorted out by the user, but the client has some built in theming options. Just roll it all in a simple app so mom and dad could use it.

Free hosting, censorship resistance, minimal styling blah blah blah. What's not to like?

I agree that a text-focused web experience is important. The modern web makes it too easy to add trackers, consent banners, ads, and other distractions that pull attention away from the content.

There’s actually a network protocol separate from the web with a small but growing user base. It uses a Markdown inspired format called Gemtext, has no cookies or trackers, and avoids most of the usual bloat seen in 2025. It’s called the Gemini protocol. It’s not perfect from the perspective of protocol design (which some people on HN can’t seem to get over), but it works, it has real users, and you can try it today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

There is something remarkably beautiful about minimal websites that use primarily text, perhaps with one or two images, and only styles that enhance readability. This is unbeatable UX. Whenever I encounter sites like these, I envision an alternative universe where the internet remained as it was in the beginning: no commercial strings attached, lightweight pages on affordable hosting, and easily accessible information so that search engines actually work. The internet was one of our greatest creations, but we’ve since ruined it with our greed...

While I do agree — using at least a non-monospaced font would be a choice that's nicer to the reader.

Color contrast is also important. Like actually putting a readable header on the page. ('^_^)

I quite enjoy reading Chris Siebenmann's blog [https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/] which is very light on theming, as I really like the aesthetic. I have to say though, if all blogs were like this the Internet might seem a bit boring, so I chose to give my own blog some personality.

Bug-free text can indeed be nice to look at.

Speaking of bugs: the Unicode-art at the bottom of the mentioned page isn't showing correctly.

No single web font can display all Unicode code-points, and using a suitable font for that Unicode-art would fix it.

More on that here:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/...

In The Netherlands, Teletekst is still used a lot, a remnant from the 80s that miraculously survived into the internet era. It's one of the most installed apps here.

https://nos.nl/teletekst

You can even consume it over SSH: "ssh teletekst.nl"

Grey text on white background :-(

I like them a whole lot! Maybe it's because I'm a screen reader user, but maybe it's because I really like the internet circa 2001. Anyone ever seen the Simpson transcripts page? It's a whole bunch of text!! Probably pretty close to text only, as it's in the native 1995 format. Accept for the search that no longer works. I've been able to use site: searches. http://simpson.walraven.org/

Couldn't agree more. I love text only pages/sites that have some style.

> Hosting text is so cheap

Hosting images is cheap too. GitHub will even do it for free!

I read the whole thing in Lynx. That's a beautiful thing, too.

Images and video are great, but everything in moderation. An image here and there to illustrate or demonstrate, but it's probably a good idea to limit yourself before loading time becomes a problem on slower connections.

The real problem that I've noticed in most cases comes from excessive JS. If you don't use JS, then you can't do tracking banner, since you can't track, can't really do ads, and video autoplay via the video tag is already disabled in browsers, so you can't do that either. With no JS, it's functionally impossible to do most of the things the ad-pilled marketers want to do with a website that makes it so horrible for the rest of us.

JS can be used in moderation too, but it opens the door to temptation, and the road from there to slow load times even on good connections is awfully short it seems.

I wish there were some cool text—only Wordpress themes.

I think there is space for images, but they should be carefully considered. They should add to the overall text.

I provide additional features for users, one is TTS so that they can listen to the article. Another feature is a little icon that appears for links that are external to the website.

I have recently come around to the idea of adding a banner image, as a way of tone setting for the text to come.

Thank you for sharing this, post 50 I find myself enjoying minimalism and text heavy content, and minimize my consumption of jangling distractions.

Scrolling down to the bottom of your page I clicked through to https://bearblog.dev/ and explored some of the pages there.

I have dreams of building a web browser that operates only in this mode. No JS, just HTML, just user-selected CSS themes. It would be incompatible with most of the modern web, but it would be a window to the kind of web I want (back). Just need to find the time.

Maybe I see too many 16pt font powerpoints but I like images. Images don't require a cdn or cookie banner or javascript, there is ample daylight between text only and heavyweight.

Agreed. 99% of the websites out there today are so loaded with images and videos that they would've taken 25 minutes to open on dial up.

Web design has gotten too complicated. I really enjoy a simple site that focuses on content and readability vs fancy frameworks. There are sites still online from the 90s that looks better than much of the stuff produced today. Plus keeping it basic means your site will work well and look good forever.

Remember all those nonsense Flash intros sites used to have? For whatever reason restaurants were the worst at this (probably because consultants building these sites impressed the owner with “fancy stuff”). They were horrible… like just show me your friggin menu and don’t make we watch a 30 second nonsense intro to your website.

The modern version of that are these horrible single page templates that everyone uses where you just keep scrolling and scrolling and the “menu” is just taking you to different parts of this scroll-o-rama nonsense. I’ll take basic with good content over fancy design all day long.

I get every webpage as text-only

I can reformat webpages into formatted text exactly the way I want it; I can save the important bits into an SQL database (I like the text-only output of sqlite3)

I do not use a popular, so-called "modern" browser; no graphics, no automatic sourcing of resources (files), no css, no javascript

I cannot understand why HN commenters believe that text-only is up to the web developer (whereupon the web user must look for aesthetcially-pleasing websites)

Text-only is up to the web user; all webpages look more or less the same to me; it's just text

Why use a graphical browser to view text

If you can come up with reasons, then either (a) you are a web developer or (b) you will be a target for online ads, whether you like them or not^1

1. And you will spend a gross amount of time and energy trying to "block" them

Please don't misunderstand me; sometimes one needs graphics, fonts, etc.^2; but that decision is up to the web user, not the web developer

tl;dr the decision to consume information published on the web as text-only is up to the web user, not the web developer

1. Such occasions might call for using a so-called "modern" browser, with graphics, Javascript and so on. For example, making airline reservations using a website. However, this does not preclude one from consuming website information as text-only, e.g., in the process of searching for fares. This decision is for the web user, not the web developer. Different web users may make different decisions.

I think the beauty comes from the simplicity and focus. Many websites with a lot of things going on can also be beautiful because they're so focused.

See Single Serving Sites as an example: https://singleservingsites.cool/

I find it amusing that many text-only webpages emphasize it with a typewriter font.

At some point we will have to get past the meta of blog posts about blog posts though.

I just knew before going there it was going to be in a monospace font.

Text-only is fine, but why do you need to make it look like a page of typewriter output?

It kind of undermines the argument, and instead insists that the site looking like just a page of text is the important aspect.

Wellll... Almost text only, except for the little SVG heart...

Will follow up with the beauty of readable fonts on text only webpages. I found this font of the blog hard to read.

Ooo, I have a fun one!

https://hawkins.tech/

bearblog has gotten way more usage than i ever would have expected

How about making a complete website using only CSS1?

All of my websites have zero JavaScript or cookies, loads on a blink.

Agreed. And by the way, I really love the simplicity of https://wordgag.com/ (even though it has some ads on it).

The author seems to be conflating text-only with no-javascript. It's perfectly possible to make text-only webpages that exhibit all of the cancer and inconvenience of the modern web. In fact, most cookie consent popups are text-only.

Kinda slow when switching sections.

I like text-only web pages, but please don’t use a monospace typeface.

It doesn't have to be text only. An html only webpage has all the same benefits. The real issue everyone has a problem with is javascript applications. The images and even multi-media in a static webpage made of html on HTTP/1.1 are not really the problem. Geocities sites had plenty of images and they were just as accessible as a 'text only' page/

The fact that I cannot "unlike" the post at the bottom of the page is mildly infuriating.

Good luck rendering latex.

> They're a refuge from the GDPR cookie banners

When I get presented with one of these I often just click out of the website.

If you're looking to spread information, make it easy by just delivering it to me unobstructed. Your GDPR bullshit doesn't apply to me anyway, I'm not in the EU.

[dead]

yes yes yes

slop

I prefer images.

Text is fed into my brain and then my brain needs to generate the image related to the text so in the end it’s all images anyway.

A text based webpage just causes me to do more work and even then the image in my mind could be wildly inaccurate.