EDIT: As I wrote this, someone deployed a server-side rendered version of the site. Now the site is perfect. :)
This site appears to load ~350 KB of JavaScript, which I think is a bit excessive for a "lite" text-only site. From the sourcemaps, I found a long list of libraries, including:
* react
* redux
* redux-thunk
* react-router
* axios
* base64-js (why not window.atob/btoa?)
* core-js
* fbjs
* react-hot-loader (should not be in a production build)
* ...a bunch of other smaller modules
There's only about 10 KB of non-library application code. Note that I ignore gzip when evaluating this sort of stuff, since that many bytes of code still need to be parsed, no matter how much it compresses.
For the person who made this site, I would replace React with Preact (or Inferno), which should remove most of the bloat. Server side rendering would also be nice for those who don't have JavaScript enabled and would also improve the loading time.
This reveals why I didn't see anything on my phone on first time visiting it. My browser just show a blank page, then seconds later the contents show up.
Because when you're treating React as a templating language, it's easier to let it run on the client side during development and add server rendering later.
i don't know react. Can you elaborate what you mean using React as a templating language? Are you saying react can be used sans any business logic and purely for template interpolation?
* Generate a HTML/DOM based on a template and data.
* Lets you efficiently update that DOM based on updates to the data and/or model (this is it's killer feature).
But if you're just going to do the first thing (generate a HTML/DOM), you don't need most of React's feature set, and you certainly don't need to push heavy JS onto the client.
For those cases, a much better approach (for both clients and SEO) is to just pre-render the DOM/HTML server-side and serve that without any need for any javascript client-side (which is what the similarly named module "Preact" does).
Josteink said it excellently, my addition is that React itself is a view library that lets you update DOM easily based on some data, and the data (and the logic behind it) can be and often are completely separated from React components themselves.
This website contacted 65 IPs in 7 countries across 35 domains to perform 314 HTTP transactions. [...]
In total, 4 MB of data was transfered, which is 12 MB uncompressed. It took 2.753 seconds to load this page.
FWIW, base64-js and similar libraries are still needed (though probably not in this case...) because window.btoa() only works on latin1 ASCII strings. Try giving it some arbitrary UTF-8:
btoa("\ud83d\ude0b") -> Uncaught DOMException: Failed to execute 'btoa' on 'Window': The string to be encoded contains characters outside of the Latin1 range.
(Edit: apparently HN doesn't either; changed to \u...)
You are 100% correct. Honestly, it doesn't need CSS even, although that's nice to have.
I've got NoScript on, and now the pages load perfectly. I think I may return to being a CNN reader now. If only they could figure out how to monetise this.
For the rest of the sentence... I was clearly referring to the question of why someone would use a library for base64 versus the built-in function. Not getting involved in the anti-js internet pitchfork mob.
Is there a collaborative community effort for "fixing" websites to make this "100 steps forward"? The relative ease and the large benefit of doing so make it surprising I haven't seen a list of lite websites maintained by volunteers.
In my understanding, Firefox Reader Mode (and similar features in other browsers) reads in the entire page and, based on analyzing the page for cues, then decides to offer the user an option to choose reader view (or not).
So while it helps improve readability, it doesn't cut down the time to load, the amount of data downloaded, and probably helps improve the battery life only marginally (this is debatable, depending on the amount of active JS, auto-play videos and also at what time offset t the user chooses reader mode after the page loads).
My laptop can run computationally-intensive physics simulations and play streaming hi-def video with no problem, but if I click a link to a mainstream news article it just about keels over and dies. How did our grandparents ever manage to load the news on an underpowered machine called "paper"?
That and the abomination of the technology stack that we use for said process. HTML/CSS/JS is absolutely not the answer for "I want to make a UI", never mind the fact that many UI designers have no clue how the stack works and abuse it horribly.
The idea may be "paper", but what's actually being done is far from it. The browser may paint and repaint a pixel a dozen times before it's ever rendered. DOM-traversal is one of the most important parts of a browser's optimization because of the tens of thousands of times it can happen to paint a screen.
Taking out a full-page newspaper ad is an attention-grabber. Taking out a full-page pop-up is merely an annoyance. Why does this perception exist? Why isn't digital space regarded on-par with paper space?
Because of this, digital ads sell for much, much less than paper ads. And so ad-supported companies have to use 10x as many ads to get 1/10 the revenue. And these ads can gain more info if they run in the client.
I use uBlock Origin, uMatrix, DuckDuckGo, and HTTPS Everywhere for a mix of adblocking and privacy. uBlock Origin lets you block specific or wildcard DOM elements - literally anything on the page. Sometimes I even block annoying photos that are not ads.
uMatrix lets you block or allow different file types from different domains. By default, you get all CSS and Image files from any site, and all Javascript from the original domain. The drop-down makes it easy to update the allowed file types, then just refresh the page. (The downside is sometimes each refresh will just load 1 more script, so it takes 15 minutes of adding another domain, refreshing, domain, refresh, until the whole capcha or all images load.)
I think it's a recent phenomenon and not related to rendering of ads.
I use Chrome and it's quite common, but not always. I would turn up the developer console and find thousands of errors and warnings when I notice the tab icon keeps blinking. The errors are mostly blocking of third-party plugins, security domain violations or similar content policy enforcement. And it just keeps reloading the same requests.
I don't have any ad blocking or any extension installed so this should be a wide spread thing. It's probably overzealous ad providers ignoring Chrome's security policies.
Does this belong to CNN? It's great to read news without clutter, just clear contents. I hope there are many sites like this, it saves you from load the whole page then click the reader mode or similar.
I said they use the same CDN hosts with the same forward and reverse names. Which I find quite convincing, on top of everything else.
dig lite.cnn.io
lite.cnn.io. 18 IN CNAME turner-tls.map.fastly.net.
turner-tls.map.fastly.net. 20 IN A 151.101.1.67
dig www.cnn.com
www.cnn.com. 39 IN CNAME turner-tls.map.fastly.net.
turner-tls.map.fastly.net. 18 IN A 151.101.1.67
This is better than CNN.com, but the big problem with CNN is that it simply isn't very good. If you're haven't tried it again, let me again strongly recommend a subscription to the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times. You might be as surprised as I was, once I was free to click around the sites without thinking about paywalls, how much better the reporting is at real newspapers than it is at free news sites.
The absolute worst thing about cnn.com is the auto-playing videos. I've been in quiet places and clicked a CNN news link only to have a video start blasting on the speakers. It's not only annoying but a huge waste of mobile bandwidth.
Now I just need an extension that rewrites all CNN urls to this site.
I play music while I work. I got tired of all the programs that insisted on using sound effects or playing other sounds, so now my computer's speakers are mechanically disabled, and I have a separate system for music.
I'll connect it to my sound system if I want to hear something from the computer, which is rarely.
0.0.0.0 ht1.cdn.turner.com # Autoplay video
0.0.0.0 ht2.cdn.turner.com # Autoplay video
0.0.0.0 ht3.cdn.turner.com # Autoplay video
0.0.0.0 ht4.cdn.turner.com # Autoplay video
0.0.0.0 ht5.cdn.turner.com # Autoplay video
0.0.0.0 ht6.cdn.turner.com # Autoplay video
0.0.0.0 ht7.cdn.turner.com # Autoplay video
0.0.0.0 ht8.cdn.turner.com # Autoplay video
0.0.0.0 ht9.cdn.turner.com # Autoplay video
0.0.0.0 a.teads.tv # Autoplay video
0.0.0.0 t.teads.tv # Autoplay video
0.0.0.0 cdn.teads.tv # Autoplay video
Not all those hosts are populated yet, but this is effective.
How do I disable autoplaying video on my Android phone though? It's really annoying that news sites think it's ok to use my mobile bandwidth with redundant videos.
That's the absolute worst thing about EVERYTHING on the web. It's usually a video of absolute nonsense too, for example just bullet points from the text below. As if we've got shitty powerpoints, with sound, that play every, single, page. Drives me insane.
This is awesome. Major props to CNN. Reminds me of an article that appeared on HN not too long ago about Conde Nast needing Google AMP because their site is so bloated.
I feel your pain, I thought it was either a Convolution or a Cellular neural network, was very disappointed. But thanks for pointing to some actual good material to read and look over.
To add to your trend, here is an article [1] about "Texture Classification and Segmentation by Cellular Neural Networks Using Genetic Learning" , texture not text though as they are more vision related, though it would be interesting to see by what methods they could be applied to text.
if you click Topics -> News[0] it takes 2.7 seconds. They should throw that subdomain behind https://memcached.org/ (and not use php lol).
Unrelated, seems like I can't listen to podcasts. There's an <audio> tag (which doesn't use data unless you click on play if you set preload="none" [1]), so that's an interesting choice.
$ curl http://thin.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001
[...]
Total wall clock time: 2.7s
$ ping thin.npr.org
[...]
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 76.407/78.359/86.985/2.442 ms
>To overcome government censorship and surveillance.
But the site isn't being censored? Also https won't stop the government from knowing that you connected to those servers. I agree that we want to avoid censorship and surveillance in general, but it really doesn't seem relevant here.
>To stop internet providers from injecting ads and tracking scripts.
Is your ISP actually doing that to you right now? Or is that just hypothetical?
> Is your ISP actually doing that to you right now? Or is that just hypothetical?
I was on a Southwest flight earlier this week which did exactly this, using HTTP injection to display an overlay on every HTTP page. It's certainly useful to provide flight information (or Amber alerts, weather information, billing alerts), but it's Just Wrong™ to violate the integrity of a communication to do so. Perhaps there should be some standard protocol for ISPs to send messages to clients, permitting the connected OS to determine how to display them?
I can't remember which country it was, but it was either a Vodaphone or O2 sim which would inject their little banner at the top of websites that weren't HTTPS. It was super annoying, especially seeing it on my own site!
A café I go to sometimes for coffee injects ads to non-HTTPS websites. Full screen ads with a timer. It's a good reminder that HTTP sites can be and are being arbitrarily manipulated and surveilled by WiFi operators.
It wouldn't stop surveillance, because there are only a limited number of pages it can serve. It's possible for an attacker to download all of them and figure out what you're reading by traffic analysis.
NPR developer here. We launched some changes to the text site this morning.
NPR set up a text site in late 2001. A developer reworked the text site in 2005. We have made very few changes since then.
The site is a set of a few PHP scripts querying our MySQL CMS database directly with no caching. The HTML and JS were aimed at providing a decent mobile experience in 2005. That included a lot of hacks and workarounds for extremely defunct platforms.
The newsroom asked us to make some improvements. The main features:
- display more news stories following editorial order rather than reverse chron,
- remove the obnoxious interstitial "read more" view for stories,
- put the text site behind Akamai like our other web properties,
- configure HTTPS on the text site (still in progress and won't be the default due to TLS overhead)
It should be a lot faster and more pleasant to use.
Thank you to everyone who made lots of noise about CNN's text offering. There is a small contingent of developers at NPR who love the text site to the point that they've created replacements as personal projects. They were very excited to improve it for the public!
An important feature is that the article pages don't have an article title. Annoying if you like to open a set of pages from the main page to read as an initial action prior to reading. Current pages at lite.cnn.io don't seem to have extra JavaScript.
We've asked you many times to post civilly and substantively here, and since it that change doesn't seem forthcoming we've banned this account. We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll post within the guidelines in the future.
When Google first came out and we tried it there were two things we liked about it.
The first: Good search results.
Yeah everyone knows that right. But young people today might have forgotten the second reason we liked Google search back then:
The Second: A clean page with a single logo and search field. It loaded quick. There were no banners everywhere, no bs.
HackerNews has that feel. It is clean, information dense, and does what it needs to do.
I'd add that Google News used to have that clean feel too, many years ago. Each generation it gets worse.
The latest generation using AMP is nearly unreadable on my Nexus 5 phone, it bogs it to a crawl.
Well, Yahoo was designed to be a web directory, which eventually evolved into portal (until mid of 2000, Yahoo search would still show "directory").
Google was all about search at the beginning. I still went to Yahoo and MSN for news and information. But I think some time after mid 2000, a lot of folks began to shift from going to portal to get information, to typing keywords "news" in Google search. Somehow we are hooked to typing keywords. When Google finally released news.google.com now users could have a quick navigation of current events. This behavior is manifested in the era of social media. So many people are now getting news from logging onto facebook / twitter. To verify, as a smart reader I would search on Google, hoping to find a full version from reputable news sites.
In some countries/culture, portal is still preferred. e.g. Yahoo Japan being one. There are still some values of Yahoo.com; I still go there if I am looking up finance news or some pop-culture entertainment news (no other new sites do better than Yahoo on entertainment news broadcast).
The second reason was the predominant reason. We already had a lot of options for search results with search engines like Altavista/aggregate sites. It's the simplicity of Google that made Google.
PS. It's also the reason Google now is increasingly less special (but they do try to keep it simple when they can, subtly).
I'm not sure that was the predominant reason. The search results were also a hell of a lot better than AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo and whatever else was around back then.
Google was a huge improvement because if you searched for Foo Bar Baz it would only give you pages that had all the words Foo, Bar and Baz whereas AltaVista et al. would give you pages containing any of the words, if memory serves. But the speed was a huge deal too, especially on a 56k modem (and the thing had to be rendered in IE4 on a Pentium II too, let's not forget).
AltaVista had a full set of boolean operators, so you could search for [Foo AND (Bar OR Baz) AND NOT Quux], which I still miss. Google appeared just when AltaVista ‘graduated’ from a showpiece for the Alpha to trying to make money and therefore turned to crap.
I don't know why, but many times Google just doesn't load here. I always open a private tab in Firefox to get rid of cookies easily, then load Google, and I don't know if this is the reason but after a while it just stops.
Duckduckgo is (for me) the new google in terms of speed, but the search results are not the same quality.
Duckduckgo is very slow for me when it comes to opening things in a new tab(Safari on a laptop). It takes several second for the right click options to come up when right clicking.
The Swedish public broadcaster still keeps their Teletext[0] service running. One of the cleanest way to get your news (especially on a TV where load times are zero). You can access it on the web as well https://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/100.html
It even has a mobile app and it is the fastest loading news app I know of and it loads even with the slowest connection. Due to restrictions of the medium, the text is short and to the point. As there are no analytics with Teletext, clickbait has never arrived there. More sites should follow that model.
Google seems to have forgotten this and now thinks its some kind of design company. Everything with the exception of adwords and analytics it has applied material to is now garbage.
News use to be my default homepage but surprisingly MSN gives me a much better product with more then 4 stories on the page on 32" monitors.
Google seems to care more about manipulating the masses than they do performance/profit. The fact they admit to passing over objectively better candidates to hit quotas proves this. I'd say what you mention is probably a side effect of that.
The poster is maybe referring to James Damore's interview with Joe Rogan, where he claims that Google executives admit to diversity procedures in hiring.
Disclaimer: I have no opinion on this topic. I am merely speculating the potential source of info.
I miss the Google of the “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” era.
Google Plus could have been fine if it wasn't rammed down user's throats. But no, every product had to integrate with it, had to look like it .... because ... Steve Jobs said so ? Then came Vic Gundotra with all the high craftsmanship of political empire building maneuvering and little else. Probably broke the original internal culture if it had survived till then (not sure).
The new google news page is awful. It's classic user interface designer making stuff pretty with no thought on how to display news. The old page was much better, it was denser. I friggin hate Google news now and am looking for a better news source. I'm not loving text only, I'd be happy with a text only top level and then text & pics for the stories.
A while back I did a comparison of the code behind the major search engines' landing pages, and found that DuckDuckGo is by far the cleanest, simplest, and most accessible, yet they still manage to make a living on text ads in their results.
Another easy way to see the difference is to load each site up in a text-only browser like links. You'll find that DDG has the cleanest interface there, too.
I still use Startpage most of the time due to the generally better search results, but DDG is my backup and sometimes finds things Startpage (i.e. Google) doesn't.
Duckduck go is a pretty good engine for 90% of searches.
I wonder however whether its (perhaps tenuous) connection with Yandex and Russia should give pause? I admit I have only read this in a headline several years back.
Great. Now we could structure the text with a markup language and syndicate it. Anyone could consume these syndicated feeds using a variety of free apps. We could even standardize this and call it... RSS :)
If only CNN would go back to being the old but trusted, amazing CNN, with Christiane Amanpour at the landing in Mogadishu during Restore Hope, or Bernie Shaw at the hotel in Baghdad for Desert Storm.
Now, a shell of its old self, CNN is just MSNBC's cousin, with people who say "we, ahem, I mean, the Democrats, are losing Michigan" live on screen.
I think they appeal to the majority sentiment which sways dem or rep depending on who's in office. They were much more center-right while Obama was at the helm.
Ah, the good ol' days, when CNN didn't have CIA minders moderating its releases and directing its reporting policies, because of, y'know .. "the war on the TERROR" .. before The Patriot Act came and ruined America.
Yeah, I remember those days too. While I'm glad that CNN has become more accessible with this text interface, I'm still not going to read it. It is, without a doubt, highly unreliable a news source, and not something one should be using to base ones world view on ..
318 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] threadThis site appears to load ~350 KB of JavaScript, which I think is a bit excessive for a "lite" text-only site. From the sourcemaps, I found a long list of libraries, including:
* react
* redux
* redux-thunk
* react-router
* axios
* base64-js (why not window.atob/btoa?)
* core-js
* fbjs
* react-hot-loader (should not be in a production build)
* ...a bunch of other smaller modules
There's only about 10 KB of non-library application code. Note that I ignore gzip when evaluating this sort of stuff, since that many bytes of code still need to be parsed, no matter how much it compresses.
For the person who made this site, I would replace React with Preact (or Inferno), which should remove most of the bloat. Server side rendering would also be nice for those who don't have JavaScript enabled and would also improve the loading time.
At least it's still better than cnn.com. http://www.webpagetest.org/result/170910_C8_e78305788a19b0fb...
That's literally the entire value prop of the website. The author isn't obligated to use your personal list of approved web tools.
The question was why a pure-text non-interactive website needs any javascript at all.
* Generate a HTML/DOM based on a template and data.
* Lets you efficiently update that DOM based on updates to the data and/or model (this is it's killer feature).
But if you're just going to do the first thing (generate a HTML/DOM), you don't need most of React's feature set, and you certainly don't need to push heavy JS onto the client.
For those cases, a much better approach (for both clients and SEO) is to just pre-render the DOM/HTML server-side and serve that without any need for any javascript client-side (which is what the similarly named module "Preact" does).
So even this "plain text" site still transfers ~98 % bloat and just ~2 % content.
its more around 90% JS, 10% content
After the first page load (with scripts cached) its around 87% content (unfortunately they don't seem to be caching CSS)
This website contacted 65 IPs in 7 countries across 35 domains to perform 314 HTTP transactions. [...] In total, 4 MB of data was transfered, which is 12 MB uncompressed. It took 2.753 seconds to load this page.
Compare this to the now-SSR cnn.io: https://urlscan.io/result/7d13efac-ffaa-4ac2-a091-8611e39b20... (59kB transfer)
Edit: Someone scanned the lite-version before they switched to SSR: https://urlscan.io/result/2a9690eb-3992-4712-a657-c3be959d51...
btoa("\ud83d\ude0b") -> Uncaught DOMException: Failed to execute 'btoa' on 'Window': The string to be encoded contains characters outside of the Latin1 range.
(Edit: apparently HN doesn't either; changed to \u...)
For what? This is a non-interactive text-only website. It shouldn't need anything beside HTML and CSS.
I've got NoScript on, and now the pages load perfectly. I think I may return to being a CNN reader now. If only they could figure out how to monetise this.
So while it helps improve readability, it doesn't cut down the time to load, the amount of data downloaded, and probably helps improve the battery life only marginally (this is debatable, depending on the amount of active JS, auto-play videos and also at what time offset t the user chooses reader mode after the page loads).
I have in the past noticed that reader mode will not be available of i have killed the JS on a site that enable their print format.
The idea may be "paper", but what's actually being done is far from it. The browser may paint and repaint a pixel a dozen times before it's ever rendered. DOM-traversal is one of the most important parts of a browser's optimization because of the tens of thousands of times it can happen to paint a screen.
I've been using Brave for a while now, on both laptop and Android.
Any time I try to load pretty much any website in Chrome on Android or SeaMonkey on laptop, it's just so painfully slow compared to Brave!
Taking out a full-page newspaper ad is an attention-grabber. Taking out a full-page pop-up is merely an annoyance. Why does this perception exist? Why isn't digital space regarded on-par with paper space?
Because of this, digital ads sell for much, much less than paper ads. And so ad-supported companies have to use 10x as many ads to get 1/10 the revenue. And these ads can gain more info if they run in the client.
I use uBlock Origin, uMatrix, DuckDuckGo, and HTTPS Everywhere for a mix of adblocking and privacy. uBlock Origin lets you block specific or wildcard DOM elements - literally anything on the page. Sometimes I even block annoying photos that are not ads.
uMatrix lets you block or allow different file types from different domains. By default, you get all CSS and Image files from any site, and all Javascript from the original domain. The drop-down makes it easy to update the allowed file types, then just refresh the page. (The downside is sometimes each refresh will just load 1 more script, so it takes 15 minutes of adding another domain, refreshing, domain, refresh, until the whole capcha or all images load.)
I use Chrome and it's quite common, but not always. I would turn up the developer console and find thousands of errors and warnings when I notice the tab icon keeps blinking. The errors are mostly blocking of third-party plugins, security domain violations or similar content policy enforcement. And it just keeps reloading the same requests.
I don't have any ad blocking or any extension installed so this should be a wide spread thing. It's probably overzealous ad providers ignoring Chrome's security policies.
Why couldn't they just put it on lite.cnn.com?
If you try to look up the whois for cnn.io, you only get:
There is nothing here that indicates this is legit CNN?Also, this registrar doesn't seem to provide _any_ whois contact information, is that allowed by ICAN?
Registering through CSC is difficult if you aren't a BigCo.
>In Hurricane #Irma’s path with a weak phone connection? Stay up to date with the text-only version of our website http://lite.cnn.io
https://twitter.com/cnnbrk/status/906655818950553600
There's also going directly to the AP(https://apnews.com/) for straight news articles, sans editorial, if that what you want.
This is awesome. It's quick, to the point, efficient, and allows me to get what I need, then it gets the fuck out of my way.
I'm even willing to put money into this. Is that possible?
Now I just need an extension that rewrites all CNN urls to this site.
I'll connect it to my sound system if I want to hear something from the computer, which is rarely.
works for me at the moment. You never know when the blighters will change the format though.
about:config
media.autoplay.enabled False
Search for "Autoplay policy" and change it to "Document user activation is required"
I haven't test it on other sites but in Youtube works fine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136525
An example to show that text CNN's are a thing: https://github.com/dennybritz/cnn-text-classification-tf
To add to your trend, here is an article [1] about "Texture Classification and Segmentation by Cellular Neural Networks Using Genetic Learning" , texture not text though as they are more vision related, though it would be interesting to see by what methods they could be applied to text.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tamas_Sziranyi/publicat...
It achieves 95% accuracy without many tricks, but the newsgroups themselves are quite different so it's not the hardest problem.
http://thin.npr.org
Unrelated, seems like I can't listen to podcasts. There's an <audio> tag (which doesn't use data unless you click on play if you set preload="none" [1]), so that's an interesting choice.
[0] http://thin.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/au...
PHP has warts, but I find it unlikely that it would be the reason for a 2.7 second page load.
* To overcome government censorship and surveillance.
* To stop internet providers from injecting ads and tracking scripts.
But the site isn't being censored? Also https won't stop the government from knowing that you connected to those servers. I agree that we want to avoid censorship and surveillance in general, but it really doesn't seem relevant here.
>To stop internet providers from injecting ads and tracking scripts.
Is your ISP actually doing that to you right now? Or is that just hypothetical?
How do you know? Without https, a MITM-attack might already be in place, and you wouldn't even notice.
Yes there are multiple instances where my isp was injecting stuff. More frequently at public wifi spots.
I was on a Southwest flight earlier this week which did exactly this, using HTTP injection to display an overlay on every HTTP page. It's certainly useful to provide flight information (or Amber alerts, weather information, billing alerts), but it's Just Wrong™ to violate the integrity of a communication to do so. Perhaps there should be some standard protocol for ISPs to send messages to clients, permitting the connected OS to determine how to display them?
https://securethe.news
Read More ... ( 19213 bytes )
Brilliant!
NPR set up a text site in late 2001. A developer reworked the text site in 2005. We have made very few changes since then.
The site is a set of a few PHP scripts querying our MySQL CMS database directly with no caching. The HTML and JS were aimed at providing a decent mobile experience in 2005. That included a lot of hacks and workarounds for extremely defunct platforms.
The newsroom asked us to make some improvements. The main features:
- display more news stories following editorial order rather than reverse chron,
- remove the obnoxious interstitial "read more" view for stories,
- put the text site behind Akamai like our other web properties,
- configure HTTPS on the text site (still in progress and won't be the default due to TLS overhead)
It should be a lot faster and more pleasant to use.
Thank you to everyone who made lots of noise about CNN's text offering. There is a small contingent of developers at NPR who love the text site to the point that they've created replacements as personal projects. They were very excited to improve it for the public!
They do have RSS however [1].
[0] http://www.cbc.ca/m/text/ [1] http://www.cbc.ca/rss/
People asked for hundreds of open tabs, they got it.
If any other news org is tuning in, please do this!
The first: Good search results. Yeah everyone knows that right. But young people today might have forgotten the second reason we liked Google search back then:
The Second: A clean page with a single logo and search field. It loaded quick. There were no banners everywhere, no bs.
HackerNews has that feel. It is clean, information dense, and does what it needs to do.
http://aautar.digital-radiation.com/blog/uploaded_images/goo...
Google was all about search at the beginning. I still went to Yahoo and MSN for news and information. But I think some time after mid 2000, a lot of folks began to shift from going to portal to get information, to typing keywords "news" in Google search. Somehow we are hooked to typing keywords. When Google finally released news.google.com now users could have a quick navigation of current events. This behavior is manifested in the era of social media. So many people are now getting news from logging onto facebook / twitter. To verify, as a smart reader I would search on Google, hoping to find a full version from reputable news sites.
In some countries/culture, portal is still preferred. e.g. Yahoo Japan being one. There are still some values of Yahoo.com; I still go there if I am looking up finance news or some pop-culture entertainment news (no other new sites do better than Yahoo on entertainment news broadcast).
PS. It's also the reason Google now is increasingly less special (but they do try to keep it simple when they can, subtly).
Duckduckgo is (for me) the new google in terms of speed, but the search results are not the same quality.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
http://www.ard-text.de/mobil/100
https://nos.nl/teletekst
I haven’t seen any one TV like that. Poland’s Teletext services are full of lonely hearts spam and are generally worthless, even though still alive.
News use to be my default homepage but surprisingly MSN gives me a much better product with more then 4 stories on the page on 32" monitors.
I'd love to see your citation on that claim.
Disclaimer: I have no opinion on this topic. I am merely speculating the potential source of info.
I miss the Google of the “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” era.
Google Plus could have been fine if it wasn't rammed down user's throats. But no, every product had to integrate with it, had to look like it .... because ... Steve Jobs said so ? Then came Vic Gundotra with all the high craftsmanship of political empire building maneuvering and little else. Probably broke the original internal culture if it had survived till then (not sure).
I'll check out MSN.
Old Google News clone.
Another easy way to see the difference is to load each site up in a text-only browser like links. You'll find that DDG has the cleanest interface there, too.
I still use Startpage most of the time due to the generally better search results, but DDG is my backup and sometimes finds things Startpage (i.e. Google) doesn't.
Now, a shell of its old self, CNN is just MSNBC's cousin, with people who say "we, ahem, I mean, the Democrats, are losing Michigan" live on screen.
Oh well. It's been years since I relied on CNN.
But on the technical front, good for them.
Yeah, I remember those days too. While I'm glad that CNN has become more accessible with this text interface, I'm still not going to read it. It is, without a doubt, highly unreliable a news source, and not something one should be using to base ones world view on ..