A couple of years ago, I started serving my blog posts as plain text. Add .txt to the end of any URl and get a deliciously lo-fi, UTF-8, mono[chrome|space] alternative. Here's this post in plain text - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites.txt Obviously a webpage without links is like a fish without a bicycle, but the joy of the web is that there are no…
You’d think somebody would already have invented some sort of HyperText Markup Language. Oh well.
I guess the point of using only text is to test how far you can go with performance. Using plaintext, or a simple markup language, also forces you to not do the things you can do with HTML.
Image a news website where the focus is the actual news, instead of the weirdly sized max-contrast cookie banner, or the weird space left for ads that do not load because of uBO.
That sounds a lot like RSS.
I’d guess more like gopher