There was a golden age where lots of websites had WAP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol) versions available while also running their "normal website", and the WAP version was always like 1/100 of the size of the normal website. Still, "normal websites" were minimal compared to now, but when you were on modem, even those websites loaded slow. For some time, most of my browsing were via the WAP versions of the websites I visited during the bi-daily hour of allowed internet access.
Maybe now we'll get something similar, just happens to be for LLMs, but for us who like less bloat, it can be a better viewing/reading alternative. Hope it spreads :)
There was also AMP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages), where Google gave a huge reputation boost to your pages provided you served them under a different URL that Google could discover, and you massively stripped down the HTML and CSS to Google's limited subset.
It's effectively dead today, and while it was dominant, Google abused it to get people to view and link to their cached copies of AMP pages, rather than the original site.
It also led to widespread abuse where the AMP version of the page differed in content significantly from the regular page. The same issue existed for WAP.
You may also remember browsing the web using Opera Mini, which wasn't a direct user-agent but used Opera's backend systems as a proxy that stripped, minified and compressed HTML/CSS, and resized and recompressed images. It let you browse the web using massively less mobile data, but raised a lot of privacy and security issues.
> It's effectively dead today, and while it was dominant, Google abused it to get people to view and link to their cached copies of AMP pages, rather than the original site.
That was the entire point of the tech. If Google had wanted they could have upranked simple and lightweight websites but they didn’t do that (at least not until whoever had used amp for their promo package left and the project was killed).
There were also quite a lot of examples where AMP pages were slower after the shift, but got ranked significantly higher. It definitely wasn't about speed, they already have that project and they could just listen to it.
AMP was just one of many smash-and-grab attempts to steal the internet, wrapped in a fake-gold-encrusted PR-infused box. Google has quite a lot of them.
> You may also remember browsing the web using Opera Mini, which wasn't a direct user-agent but used Opera's backend systems as a proxy that stripped, minified and compressed HTML/CSS, and resized and recompressed images. It let you browse the web using massively less mobile data, but raised a lot of privacy and security issues.
I remember how amazing that mode was on desktop, I'd sometimes enabled it on site and shrink it horizontally just to look at it handle anything perfectly. Don't remember if that was independent of the proxy though, I just cared about the removed padding and the responsiveness. Make all sites look like that and add some gutter to the side I can toggle and resize, and I'll use your browser kthx.
Google AMP might have enforced stripped down HTML, but I think you were also supposed to embed their JS as well, probably making a page that was lightweight from the start heavier…
amp wasn't just stripped down HTML either, it was a mix of restricted HTML and custom AMP components, the latter being necessary to load external resources (breaking standard browser preload scanners and requiring amp's js to load before that could happen). The banned HTML elements (https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/websites/...) included img, picture, video, audio, iframe, all replaced with equivalent amp components.
Safari has a very pleasant reader mode that, while not pure markdown, does capture quite a bit of the experience by standardizing presentation and stripping out distractions. You can set Safari to automatically engage reader mode on websites you specify, when it detects an article.
Firefox has this too, it's useful. However I only find that I use it for websites that have shit CSS that makes it hard to read on mobile. For everything else AdBlock Plus works fine.
iirc I can use Firefox's reader mode on websites that if I simply disabled js entirely would refuse to load anything at all. The viewer itself might have minimal or no js but it's not quite the same.
Seconding this. Incredibly useful feature, especially on sites who's JavaScript is constantly jerking the DOM and/or scroller around. So fucking annoying.
It's frankly wild how many of my favorite tools for Internet browsing have nothing to do with connectivity, solving bugs, or any of that and it's just stripping out all the fucking BULLSHIT that comes on a modern website.
It's a shame it's almost illegal. If you make a website that proxies content to another website but not ads, you go to jail. Reader mode only survives because it's client-side and fairly generic.
When the GDPR came into force https://npr.org started redirecting to https://text.npr.org with an explanation that sounded like that fact was supposed to annoy you, but I honestly find the latter superior especially now that they’ve added a few more lines of CSS to it.
There was a golden age where lots of websites had WAP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol) versions available while also running their "normal website", and the WAP version was always like 1/100 of the size of the normal website. Still, "normal websites" were minimal compared to now, but when you were on modem, even those websites loaded slow. For some time, most of my browsing were via the WAP versions of the websites I visited during the bi-daily hour of allowed internet access.
Maybe now we'll get something similar, just happens to be for LLMs, but for us who like less bloat, it can be a better viewing/reading alternative. Hope it spreads :)
There was also AMP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages), where Google gave a huge reputation boost to your pages provided you served them under a different URL that Google could discover, and you massively stripped down the HTML and CSS to Google's limited subset.
It's effectively dead today, and while it was dominant, Google abused it to get people to view and link to their cached copies of AMP pages, rather than the original site.
It also led to widespread abuse where the AMP version of the page differed in content significantly from the regular page. The same issue existed for WAP.
You may also remember browsing the web using Opera Mini, which wasn't a direct user-agent but used Opera's backend systems as a proxy that stripped, minified and compressed HTML/CSS, and resized and recompressed images. It let you browse the web using massively less mobile data, but raised a lot of privacy and security issues.
> It's effectively dead today, and while it was dominant, Google abused it to get people to view and link to their cached copies of AMP pages, rather than the original site.
That was the entire point of the tech. If Google had wanted they could have upranked simple and lightweight websites but they didn’t do that (at least not until whoever had used amp for their promo package left and the project was killed).
There were also quite a lot of examples where AMP pages were slower after the shift, but got ranked significantly higher. It definitely wasn't about speed, they already have that project and they could just listen to it.
AMP was just one of many smash-and-grab attempts to steal the internet, wrapped in a fake-gold-encrusted PR-infused box. Google has quite a lot of them.
> You may also remember browsing the web using Opera Mini, which wasn't a direct user-agent but used Opera's backend systems as a proxy that stripped, minified and compressed HTML/CSS, and resized and recompressed images. It let you browse the web using massively less mobile data, but raised a lot of privacy and security issues.
I remember how amazing that mode was on desktop, I'd sometimes enabled it on site and shrink it horizontally just to look at it handle anything perfectly. Don't remember if that was independent of the proxy though, I just cared about the removed padding and the responsiveness. Make all sites look like that and add some gutter to the side I can toggle and resize, and I'll use your browser kthx.
Google AMP might have enforced stripped down HTML, but I think you were also supposed to embed their JS as well, probably making a page that was lightweight from the start heavier…
amp wasn't just stripped down HTML either, it was a mix of restricted HTML and custom AMP components, the latter being necessary to load external resources (breaking standard browser preload scanners and requiring amp's js to load before that could happen). The banned HTML elements (https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/websites/...) included img, picture, video, audio, iframe, all replaced with equivalent amp components.
Safari has a very pleasant reader mode that, while not pure markdown, does capture quite a bit of the experience by standardizing presentation and stripping out distractions. You can set Safari to automatically engage reader mode on websites you specify, when it detects an article.
Firefox has this too, it's useful. However I only find that I use it for websites that have shit CSS that makes it hard to read on mobile. For everything else AdBlock Plus works fine.
Firefox reader mode can often strip out JS annoyances.
Doesn't reader mode disable JS by definition?
iirc I can use Firefox's reader mode on websites that if I simply disabled js entirely would refuse to load anything at all. The viewer itself might have minimal or no js but it's not quite the same.
ABP works for the most common of these too (e.g. popups/banners)! You have to enable it in the settings I think.
JS annoyances it won't fix are like idiotic scrolling behaviour and stuff. And for that, yeah reader mode is ideal.
Seconding this. Incredibly useful feature, especially on sites who's JavaScript is constantly jerking the DOM and/or scroller around. So fucking annoying.
It's frankly wild how many of my favorite tools for Internet browsing have nothing to do with connectivity, solving bugs, or any of that and it's just stripping out all the fucking BULLSHIT that comes on a modern website.
It's a shame it's almost illegal. If you make a website that proxies content to another website but not ads, you go to jail. Reader mode only survives because it's client-side and fairly generic.
Under what law would one be charged?
IANAL but I'd guess copyright infringion: unauthorized (re)distribution of copyrighted content.
The only website that I know has that has that is Daring Fireball (add ".text" to the end of the url), but the author of that blog invented markdown
When the GDPR came into force https://npr.org started redirecting to https://text.npr.org with an explanation that sounded like that fact was supposed to annoy you, but I honestly find the latter superior especially now that they’ve added a few more lines of CSS to it.
NetNewsWire "Reader View" is a truly wonderful feature: https://netnewswire.com/help/mac/5.1/en/reader-view.html