Text-Only CNN
lite.cnn.comWow, it's amazing how lite & fast web sites can be when they're not loaded down with images and advertisements and tracking cookies! Who would have ever imagined?
sarcasm definitely intended.
this is how I wish the web would be again.
This is how the web is for me all the time. I use a text-only browser plus some DNS tricks. Fast and reliable.
What about all those single page apps websites working more with JavaScript than with html ? Does it work well ?
These comprise a small proportion of the sites submitted to HN. As for their share of the web as a whole, not sure how prevalent they are.
As such, I usually approach these as one-offs. I find the endpoint and move on. I just use the endpoint, not the "web app". Before I start scanning the JS files to find the endpoint, I first check for a corresponding Github page as most of the web developers using those frameworks so religiously have one. They often post the web app page to HN instead of the Github page. Obviously one can just run the site in a Javascript enabled browser, observe the traffic, and find the endpoint that way. Once you have the endpoint, you will never need to visit the "blank page" ever again. Of course you should be comfortable with JSON. I have no issue with raw JSON in lieu of HTML. In most cases it is easier to process.
If these JS framework sites were more prevalent, and they actually were sites that had data I cared about, I might automate a solution. Most of them tend to be aimed at collecting data, not supplying it, hence I am not much interested in them usually.
Here's a compilation of other lightweight news websites as well as other services.
NPR has one too
Now, what'd make this actually useful is if it either used the same pathing or auto-redirected accordingly, so I could just replace 'www' with 'lite' in a URL, since I only ever visit CNN when I'm being linked there, and visiting the normal website causes my browser to hang.
Like old.reddit.com
I've been using this for years and years on my Nokia E71. Back in the days, a lot of sites had a dedicated mobile page, typically reachable on on the http://m.<domain> URL.
I read the title and thought CNN stood for convnet, and thought - didn't we see these in 2014?