[HN Gopher] 68k.news: A Netscape 1.1 makeover of Google News ___________________________________________________________________ 68k.news: A Netscape 1.1 makeover of Google News Author : gripfx Score : 261 points Date : 2021-03-29 15:38 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (68k.news) (TXT) w3m dump (68k.news) | icameron wrote: | This is perfect! I have news.google.com blocked on my PC because | I'm trying to block a bad habit of idly typing it in and getting | sucked into the void. Came to HN and still found a way to get the | news drip without as much distraction. :) | yegle wrote: | Not having HTTPS certificate is a nice touch :-) | _joel wrote: | I prefer this to the full-fat version anyway, even on modern | CPUs. Bookmarked | ape4 wrote: | There are a few html mistakes - stray tags, etc. View source in | Firefox colors them red. | gedy wrote: | Subjective, but I wonder if browsers had defaulted to sans serif | font instead of serif, people wouldn't complain about "how bad | this webpage looks". I get the document origins of course. | butz wrote: | Is meta tag outside of html intentional? HTML 2.0 was way before | my webdev days. | mattowen_uk wrote: | I'm going to hazard a guess, that because ancient browsers | sometimes displayed html tags they didn't understand, the | author has deployed a hack to ensure the correct character | encoding is used on a new browsers without soiling the | rendering on older systems. | | Also, I was hoping that 68k.news supported HTTP 1.0, but it | doesn't, it's a virtual host on the IP, so needs the host: | header variable set, which is HTTP 1.1 - that's a bit of a | shame as it means the original browsers such as Mosaic can't | access it. | joemaller1 wrote: | Wish the width was a little narrower, or fluid. Reading on a | phone is kind of small. | IncRnd wrote: | This looks almost like an RSS feed. | whalesalad wrote: | This is great. I have been looking for a "world news in the style | of techmeme" that isn't the drudge report. | skyfaller wrote: | Now, here's a web page that NetSurf has no trouble with! | franklampard wrote: | eeew | AltruisticGapHN wrote: | Needs a very light gray background. | | To be devil's advocate, I feel like those serif fonts were easier | to read on a low resolution monitor because they were sharper due | to the pixels being very apparent. | | Here not even on a 4K, I find it difficult to read the headlines. | pcdoodle wrote: | Super cool. SE/30's are amazing machines. Does HN render on | netscape <= V4? | helfire wrote: | Pretty ok - | https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#https://news.ycombinat... | cmiller1 wrote: | This is wonderful! As pages get more bloated and new crypto is | used for https my old computers lose access to more and more of | the web, bookmarking this to browse from mac os 9 later on today. | artembugara wrote: | I'm curious where the data get fetched from. The Author mentions | that Mozilla Readability and SimplePie are used. | | Readability to parse the content. SimplePie to fetch the data (I | assume). Dat from RSS feeds? | | In case you want to make something similar, I recently wrote a | blog on where you could get news data for free [1] | | (self-promo) I'd recommend to take a look at my Python package to | mine news data from Google News [2]. Also, in 3 days we're | releasing an absolutely free News API [3] that will support | ~50-100k top stories per day. | | [1] https://blog.newscatcherapi.com/an-ultimate-list-of-open- | sou... | | [2] https://github.com/kotartemiy/pygooglenews | | [3] https://newscatcherapi.com/free-news-api | drewg123 wrote: | Comparing this to the normal Google News, we have a load time of | 450ms vs 6500ms on a fairly beefy workstation. I have a new | bookmark.. | tyingq wrote: | Looks/works nice in lynx (text browser) as well, where google | news itself does not. Bookmarked. | every wrote: | Works nicely in links2 as well... | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser) | knodi123 wrote: | I didn't know the <small> tag was that old! Also thought a page | from back then would be ascii instead of utf8. | | (Also, I thought every page from that era was required to have at | least one <blink> tag, and possibly an "Under Construction" | image.) | Yhippa wrote: | My favorite part by far is when you click on a link you see just | the plain text of the article sans distractions. | | Edit: also it shows a few key news articles with related | articles. This means I'm not infinitely scrolling which is nice. | k1m wrote: | I work on something called https://txtify.it that you can | prefix onto almost any article URL to get a plain text-only | version, e.g. | | https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/nyregio... | DavidPeiffer wrote: | >My favorite part by far is when you click on a link you see | just the plain text of the article sans distractions. | | You may also like http://lite.cnn.com/en | | It's so refreshing to have pages load instantly. Websites get | so bogged down with loading resources from 12 different places. | It'd be nice if a static webpage was the default and every | change that slowed down loading was explicitly laid out to | stakeholders in terms of marginal load time and resources | required. | ehsankia wrote: | Chrome has a "reader mode" semi-hidden feature which does | this to any article on any site, and in my experience works | perfectly 99% of the time. On mobile it's a huge saver, | especially since Chrome by default doesn't have ad-block, and | articles on mobile nowadays have become utterly unreadable | with all the crap they throw at you. | | This is another reason I like AMP in general, despite all of | its issues, it generally is much cleaner [1] than the non-amp | alternatives [2] | | [1] https://i.imgur.com/qYd1mCX.png | | [2] https://i.imgur.com/SwK6unL.png | oconnor663 wrote: | How do I turn on reader mode for Chrome on Android? (Edit: | Ah, seems to be the "simplified view" under accessibility | settings.) | russellbeattie wrote: | What's sad about that page and the articles it links to is | that it could be soooo much better designed and _still_ be | clean and fast. | | The main list could have dates and times and categories, so | it's not just a dump of text links. | | Each article could have a reasonably sized image or two | without compromising the load speed. | | Finally, a single "sponsored by" link could be included in | the page to provide revenue via advertising. | | It's insane that media companies feel that their sites need | to be a bloated mess or barely there, and nothing in between. | | Regardless, the fact that the URL isn't served via https is | an indicator to me the this is a forgotten service and will | eventually disappear the next time CNN does an overhaul of | its web servers. | Thaxll wrote: | Reminds me of the light CNN version: http://lite.cnn.com/en | fhsm wrote: | or NPR: https://text.npr.org/ which I like more b/c the targets | of the links have a line width that I find easier to read. | gigatexal wrote: | I like this so much more! | spiritplumber wrote: | This is beautiful. Everything should have a text mode like this. | | I should make it an option for my own site, and I will! Thank you | for the inspiration. | twobitshifter wrote: | Neat project. I use NetNewsWire for rss. It's interesting that | the format people prefer to consume news in versus the format | that news is delivered in are now so different. | | Newspapers went through the same thing. The older papers are all | stories and were funded through the price of the paper, then ads | invaded the margins. | msla wrote: | > The older papers are all stories and were funded through the | price of the paper, then ads invaded the margins. | | I assure you 19th Century newspapers had advertisements. | | For example: | | https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86072192/1897-08-0... | | And an 18th Century newspaper with advertisements: | | https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83021183/1777-03-0... | | How far back do you go to find newspapers with no | advertisements? | jjordan wrote: | Any chance of providing an RSS feed? The plaintext nature of the | actual articles is delightful. | masswerk wrote: | Great! For even better results, please, set the background-color | to `#C0C0C0`. (Netscape default. However, I'm not sure, if this | was also the default on Windows, as well.) | | Compare this bookmarklet: | https://www.masswerk.at/bookmarklets/netscapify/ | ArtWomb wrote: | Agreed. Blue text on white background is jarring. And I was | wondering what the original Netscape Grey was! | | Argh. Hoping "Godzilla vs Kong" reviews were going to be | better. When will Hollywood learn the secret to a good kaiju | film = less humans, more monsters ;) | mambodog wrote: | You can experience this on an (emulated) 68k Mac in your browser | using Oldweb.Today: | https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#http://68k.news/ | reaperducer wrote: | "Sorry, OldWeb.today can not run in this emulator in your | current browser. Please try the latest version of Chrome or | Firefox to use this emulator." | | Funny that an emulated Mac hates Safari. | debo_ wrote: | First impression: "Wow, this warms my heart." | | Second impression: _instinctively tries scrolling with | trackpad_ _help why isn 't it working_ | | This really made my day, thank you for sharing it. | biggieshellz wrote: | Oh wow -- this takes me back to when I first experienced the | graphical Internet on a Macintosh IIsi! Thanks! | gripfx wrote: | Interview with the founder on the Register[0] | | [0] | https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/29/google_news_netscape_... | k1m wrote: | Thanks for the link. Technical part from that interview: | | > On a technical level, the site obtains stories through the | existing Google News RSS feed, which are then processed with | some PHP trickery. "Google News has a very nice RSS feed, for | each topic, language and country. So I thought I could connect | to that feed, and write some code to simplify the result way | down to extremely basic HTML, targeting only tags available in | the HTML 2.0 specification from 1995," said Malseed. | | > "So I used a PHP library called SimplePie to import the feed, | and wrote some PHP code to simplify the results into a nice | front page, using Netscape 2.0.2 on my 1989 Mac SE/30 to make | sure it loaded fast and looked nice. The articles were a little | more difficult, because they are on all sorts of different news | sites with different formatting. | | > "So I found that Mozilla has an open-source library called | Readability, which is what powers Firefox's reader mode. I used | the PHP port of this, and then wrote a proxy that renders | articles through Readability, and then I added some code to | strip the results down even further to extremely basic HTML." | willchis wrote: | This is similar to a site that I built! http://feather.news | | Best viewed on mobile and you can optionally use a version | without images by clicking the link at the top right of the page. | bobajeff wrote: | I like the layout of yours better. But I still like 68k's | feature of giving you the readable version of the stories too. | darkwizard42 wrote: | I think my favorite part is just how short some of these articles | really are once you remove all the nonsense and extra crap in the | web pages. | | Some articles are actually... 8 sentences. That is it. How on | earth does it then take 10 seconds to scroll and parse all the | fake inserts to finally realize that this is a poorly researched | snippet masquerading as news... | deagle50 wrote: | Where are you seeing the short version of the article? Each | link takes me to the original. | setr wrote: | The links try to parse out the text and show that, with an | additional link to the original article (seems like most | links fail to parse however) | | A successful Example | | http://68k.news/article.php?loc=US&a=https://news.google.com. | .. | dan-robertson wrote: | It's reasonable to have short articles in a newspaper, where | you want to fit in a bunch of short factual stories, or on a | newswire where you just want to quickly send out some facts | before competitors. In the former case you just put lots of | stories on one page. In the latter case, it's often expected to | be short. | kevincox wrote: | I think short articles are great! But it is crazy how much | crap gets added to nice short articles on most sites. | tachyonbeam wrote: | I guess a lot of the BS filler text is added just so they | can fit more ads around the text, huh? The goal for online | publications isn't to inform you and save you time... It's | to make you click on ads. They want to have you see as many | ads as possible, and make sure that you stay on the page as | long as possible. If the news article was just a one- | paragraph snippet, you couldn't fit 8 ads on the page, it | would look absolutely laughable. | ljm wrote: | A newspaper or news website would source most of their | journalism from Reuters or Associated Press, and then | fluff it up to fit their editorial stance. | | The same articles would seem longer in print because | they're formatted in such narrow columns, wrapping around | images. There's some thought that goes into the layout. | | Of course, the internet breaks that particular illusion. | And I'm sure that if a marketing department could do to | their printed paper what they do to their website, design | and readability be damned, they would jump at the chance. | consumer451 wrote: | > I think my favorite part is just how short some of there | articles are... | | In an attempt to enjoy this effect more broadly, I have Reader | Mode set to enabled by default on Safari mobile. | | On Firefox desktop I often use the Reader View button on news | stories. There is an extension to enable this by default, but I | have a hard time trusting browser add-ons. | Kelamir wrote: | What do you think about recommended add-ons by Firefox, for | example Tranquility Reader https://addons.mozilla.org/en- | US/firefox/addon/tranquility-1... ? Their code is supposed to | be checked by Firefox team, so it's probably safe to use. | cypres wrote: | > I have Reader Mode set to enabled by default on Safari | mobile | | I didn't know you can do that, thank you! | jrmann100 wrote: | I know I'm the only one who's reading news on the Kindle Voyage, | but I'm definitely adding this to my bookmarks list on the | e-reader. Super cool! | sharklazer wrote: | I don't know if you can fix google news after google broke it | themselves back in 2011/2012, but this comes close. | throwaway4good wrote: | Where is the feed this is based upon from? | | Google news rss seems to be different and is full with amp links: | | https://news.google.com/rss?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en | Bilal_io wrote: | Regarding the amp links, they could parse the results and try | to replace the amp links | tiborsaas wrote: | Very retro with all those <font size="5"> tags, but that's the | job of CSS :) | | Edit: there was no CSS support in 1.1 :) | mikepurvis wrote: | At the same time, it's interesting to see those tags used for | what otherwise looks like a pretty un-styled page. | | Like, part of the premise of CSS was progressive enhancement, | where just the semantic structure alone would provide an | adequate experience with however the browser might choose to | render those elements by default. Basically my question is, if | the font size tags were taken out and just bare h3/h4/p used | instead, would that still render a usable page on Netscape 1.1? | Could you then supply font overrides via a <style> tag in the | header which could be applied by later browsers? | | Obviously it would be a different kind of experiment as the | result would no longer be identical across all the "supported" | browsers, but might be an interesting comparison point. | icedchai wrote: | Yep, CSS wasn't really supported anywhere until 1997. Most | places were still using font tags and table-based layouts for | quite a while after. | jandrese wrote: | And in the 90s CSS was unreliable and often difficult to use. | Internet Explorer made it difficult to go full CSS for a long | time. | icedchai wrote: | I still think CSS is difficult to use. Out of HTML/CSS/JS, | I despise CSS the most. | drummojg wrote: | It's what drove me out of wanting to work in Web | authoring. I looked at CSS and literally decided "I am | not going to learn this." | icedchai wrote: | It has gotten a bit better. The early CSS era (floats, | etc) was worse than tables, I thought. | jandrese wrote: | Early CSS had a huge problem with this. | | "Don't use tables, use CSS!" was a big message. But CSS's | tools for tabular layout were extremely poor and | difficult to use, leading to much frustration. It was a | joke how hard it was to create a simple responsive three | column layout in CSS, a thing easily accomplished with | tables and very common on the web. Getting that three | column layout right seemed like black magic in CSS1. | rsoto wrote: | Also http since https was not supported at the time. What a way | to commit into an idea! | PAPPPmAc wrote: | It's committed to the idea so that it actually works on | period machines. See /r/retrobattlestations announce thread: | https://old.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/meqlql. | .. | | It's surprisingly tractable to plug 90s machines into the | internet via ethernet adapters or little serial gadgets that | can do SLIP or pretend to be hayes modems, but the modern web | full of crypto and execution environments that can bring | modern computers to their knees is not kind to them. | throwaway823882 wrote: | Considering the content, maybe it should be renamed "Google | Trivia". It's like a bad version of Reddit with no comments for | context/addl information. | fireeyed wrote: | Love this. Loads much much faster than Google PWA page. | alex_young wrote: | Reminds me of text only CNN: http://lite.cnn.com/en | abricot wrote: | This is great. Google News has been unavailable in my area for | years. | fermienrico wrote: | I know this is supposed to be retro but I use NPR text mode | always. No pics, just text, its glorious. | | https://text.npr.org/ | | Far easier to read since the length of the line is absolutely | perfect. Pro tip: https://practicaltypography.com/line- | length.html | | That said - something is wrong with NPR, a bunch of Lorem Ipsum | links :) | alpb wrote: | It would be great to get this working on each of our personalized | Google News feed. But I suspect it would require either a | userscript stylesheet or Google sign-in (if that even gives you a | personalized feed). | rkagerer wrote: | What a breath of fresh air. I forgot how human-friendly the | internet was before ads invaded. | eljimmy wrote: | Viewing the source of that webpage really takes you back. Plain | old HTML. It's nostalgic beauty. | | I recently fixed up an old 486 I purchased off eBay but it was | bittersweet when I managed to get it connected to the 'net. Most | websites were inaccessible due to the lack of support for today's | encryption protocols, those that were had numerous JavaScript | issues. | chungy wrote: | Try browservice: https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice | dheera wrote: | Except this bullshit: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC | "-//W3C//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <meta http-equiv="Content- | Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <html> | | Back in the day, you only needed: <html> | jhgb wrote: | Don't you only need <!DOCTYPE html> | <html> | | these days? That's slightly worse but not terribly so IMO. | dheera wrote: | Oh I actually quoted the website's source. They have that | DTD meta crap in there. | | But I think you can just do <html> nowadays and it | empirically just works. Seriously, screw the anti-DRY | people that want me to put some !DOCTYPE or xmlns tags with | some W3C links or some DTD nonsense inside ... I should | only have to specify "html" exactly once, no more. | | If I had designed the spec I would have just made it | <html version="4.0"> <html version="5.0"> | <html version="5.1"> | | Incredibly more readable, and memorizable. A markup | language (literally), by virtue of being a _markup_ | language, should not be impossible to memorize. Making | scary strings like "-//W3C///DTD" part of the spec is | counterproductive. | skymt wrote: | You don't even need <html>. | <https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the- | ht...> | | This is a valid HTML5 document: <!doctype | html> <title>This is valid!</title> | <p>Really, it's valid! | | Paste it into the validator yourself if you don't believe | me: <https://validator.w3.org/nu/#textarea> | jhgb wrote: | Wow, I didn't actually know that. That feels...so dirty! | zczc wrote: | Also utf-8 (or any Unicode) wasn't supported by most (all?) | Netscape versions. Falling back to default Latin1 works with | English text though. | majewsky wrote: | Nitpick 1: That DTD is for HTML 2.0, which was published in | 1995. If that does not qualify as "back in the day", I don't | know what does. | | Nitpick 2: <meta> goes inside <html> (inside <head>, really). | | Nitpick 3: The <meta> tag is only a band-aid for shitty | webhosting where you cannot access the webserver config to | make it send the correct Content-Type in the actual HTTP | response headers. The modern <!DOCTYPE html> instead implies | a default of UTF-8 which works well for most. | skymt wrote: | Nitpick nitpick: the html doctype doesn't imply UTF-8. | Valid modern HTML documents must be encoded using UTF-8, | but the standard also requires that the encoding be | specified somehow. | | > The Encoding standard requires use of the UTF-8 character | encoding and requires use of the "utf-8" encoding label to | identify it... If an HTML document does not start with a | BOM, and its encoding is not explicitly given by Content- | Type metadata, and the document is not an iframe srcdoc | document, then the encoding must be specified using a meta | element with a charset attribute or a meta element with an | http-equiv attribute in the Encoding declaration state. | | <https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#char | ac...> | tyingq wrote: | I do appeciate some of it, but I don't miss this type of thing: | <font size="5" color="#9400d3"> | | Though I understand why they are doing it in this case. | mikepurvis wrote: | Were you just using the browser/OS it came with, I guess like | Windows 3.1 or 95? | | Given their well-publicized insistence on building for a ton of | obscure arches, I'd expect you could run modern Debian on such | a machine no problem, with a modern web browser. Might be a | little slow, especially if you stick with the original disk, | but should be perfectly usable. | duskwuff wrote: | > I'd expect you could run modern Debian on such a machine no | problem... | | Nope. Current builds of i386 Debian require a Pentium Pro or | later -- I believe it's because they're compiled with the | CMOV instruction, which wasn't present in the Pentium or | earlier. | mikepurvis wrote: | Ah, good point. Looks like Debian Jessie might have worked | for it? In any case, distrowatch suggests a few others like | Alpine and TinyCore that might have the proper support. | StreamBright wrote: | And this is how the web supposed to be. | FullMetalBitch wrote: | And it looks fine and is perfectly functional. Maybe just tweak | the background. | azinman2 wrote: | Looks fine? It is a big blob of undistinguished text. If you | squint your eyes everything looks the same. The lack of | column widths means your eyes have to do a lot of scanning | especially on a bigger/wider screen. The lack of | color/font/size differentiation means there's almost no | information hierarchy to it. While we all might complain | about advertisements and loading times, I for one are very | glad we have moved on so significantly. | kalia35 wrote: | It is indeed! ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-03-29 23:00 UTC)