[HN Gopher] Plain Text Sports
___________________________________________________________________
Plain Text Sports
Author : abzug
Score : 233 points
Date : 2022-03-21 13:47 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (plaintextsports.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (plaintextsports.com)
| smcl wrote:
| I'd love something like this for European football leagues. The
| "best" I've found is https://livescore.com but for a while they
| stopped working on iPhone (they really wanted you to download
| their app) and I'm quite sure they're probably full of trackers
| and stuff.
| dagurp wrote:
| I've used https://m.livesoccertv.com/ or
| https://www.bbc.com/sport they're not too heavy
| CodeIsTheEnd wrote:
| Hey, HN! Creator here!
|
| I started building Plain Text Sports last year when I was
| watching an NFL playoff game in rural southwest Wisconsin. We had
| poor TV reception -- the image was going in-and-out -- and the
| local radio station was mostly static. I tried to check ESPN, but
| the loading bar was as frozen as the ground outside. I then had
| the idea for a website designed for the pure sports fan: no ads,
| no images, just scores, play-by-play and stats, with a simple
| information-dense display.
|
| I initially added support for the NBA so I could follow my
| beloved Milwaukee Bucks. I posted it to /r/nba, got over 600
| upvotes in a few hours, and got perma-banned for self-promotion.
| (I did a Show HN too, but it didn't take off. [1]) Over the
| following months I added NHL, MLB, NFL, college basketball and
| football, and added standings and team schedules so it could
| really be a one-stop-shop for my sporting needs. Just this past
| month I added MLS and NWSL (National Women's Soccer League). I
| plan on adding the WNBA and the Premier League later this year
| too.
|
| Obviously I designed the site with minimalism and efficiency in
| mind, as a reaction to the bloated web we see today. We don't
| need heaps of JavaScript just to display a bit of text, nor do we
| need half-a-dozen sites tracking our "engagement", and our
| "retention". People just want to get the information they're
| looking for, as fast as possible. Technology shouldn't get in the
| way.
|
| Despite the austere presentation, I'm really proud of the design
| of the site. As a commenter noted, it's not actually plain text,
| but does use some CSS and a tiny bit of JavaScript (sue me!). But
| there are a lot of small details that I put a lot of effort into:
| the game times on the front page automatically show up in your
| local time zone, and the boxes automatically expand to fit long
| time-zones. For the NBA, the raw play-by-play data I get is very
| granular. A steal, for example, is both a turnover by the
| offensive player, and a steal for the defensive player, but I
| combine those into a single event in the timeline. For the NFL, I
| draw an ASCII drawing of the field showing the progress of the
| most recent play [2]. When a team wins a championship, they get
| an ASCII trophy and a dedicated spot on the front-page for the
| next week. It's been really fun trying to figure out how to pack
| as much information as possible into a 45 column-wide display.
|
| A streamer I watch on Twitch [3] who does marketing at Nvidia
| also had a competition amongst his viewers to make their own ads,
| and that led me down another rabbit hole of fun "plain-text"
| videos. [4][5][6].
|
| Plain Text Sports also led to my next project. I get a lot of
| data from publicly accessible, but undocumented JSON APIs, and it
| was frustrating digging through giant JSON files trying to
| understand how certain situations were represented. That led me
| to build jless [7], a command-line JSON viewer, which made it to
| the front page last month.
|
| [1]: Original Show HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310314
|
| [2]: ASCII football field:
| https://twitter.com/CodeIsTheEnd/status/1436003783327293452
|
| [3]: Atrioc, Nvidia marketing streamer: https://twitch.tv/atrioc
|
| [4]: Never Miss Moment Ad:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t1qY0vOJWc
|
| [5]: Bucks Championship Run:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WHcP4PTBHY
|
| [6]: Wisconsin Sports Ad:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLsm0MirOEg
|
| [7]: jless, a command-line JSON viewer: https://jless.io
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Great work on the website. I really like the minimalist style.
| Will definitely use it once you have the Premier League on
| there.
|
| I've actually considered building a similar type of site for a
| while but wasn't sure how to get the real-time sports score
| updates.
|
| Do you have to pay for that data?
| modo_ wrote:
| wow small world- you have a poster up in your window with the
| URL, right? i think you live around the corner from me!
| CodeIsTheEnd wrote:
| I sure do! Knock if you ever want some stickers!
| stephenhandley wrote:
| This is awesome. Do you mind sharing the json data source
| you're using for the NBA data?
| bennetth wrote:
| Very cool, thanks for making this! I'm curious if you have any
| plans to monetize the site, or at least cover your costs? I
| know the live sports data feeds are not that cheap!
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Love it and found it via Gruber's post.
|
| Question: why not use a proportional font for all things other
| than the score? It would make readability _much_ better. Is the
| output being mapped to individual character widths, that 's
| why?
|
| EDIT: One more question, is there a URL I can share that
| enables dark mode? e.g. https://plaintextsports.com/?mode=dark
| bachmeier wrote:
| Thanks for your work. I've been using your site for a while.
| Amazing how in 2022, with 4G widely available, it's that
| difficult to check a game score every five minutes while you're
| working. It feels as if sites like ESPN optimize their sites to
| minimize the probability that they are useful.
| stadium wrote:
| It'd be fun to have a sms subscription to a particular league's
| schedule, a team's activities, or a single game.
| ubertaco wrote:
| I did a `curl https://plaintextsports.com/mls/standings` and, to
| my surprise, got an HTML response back (rather than just
| plaintext data).
|
| Seems like this isn't actually plaintext (as in the mimetype
| `text/plain`), but is instead just "minimalist-aesthetic sports"
| (with the caveat that for some reason there's CSS styling to make
| the font unreadably small at 2560x1440, which was what led me to
| try `curl` in the first place, assuming that since it'd be
| plaintext, I could just get the data in plaintext without any
| extra CSS formatting making it hard to read).
| stevage wrote:
| Yep, seems we're all unclear on what the actual intent is here
| since it seems to fail most of the use cases that "plain text"
| brings to mind.
| erickhill wrote:
| Sadly, it's https. So a lot of older computers that still live
| and breathe off of sites like this (see: 68k.news) can't access
| it due to the bizarre (or Google pressured) security certificate
| ... for a sports scores site.
| oneplane wrote:
| That's nonsense and you know it. If you really want to use
| plain-text web access you can run a local decryption proxy
| outside of your low-power old computers and use them as if it's
| 1989.
| erickhill wrote:
| I actually have no idea what you just said (and you can
| believe it). But I'll Google "local decryption proxy" and see
| if that's something feasible I could try with, say, my
| Powerbook Pismo running macOS 9.2 with no modern browsers.
| I'm no engineer, so please don't assume everyone here is.
| mminer237 wrote:
| This site is specifically targeted to software engineers,
| so it's a reasonable assumption that we can talk about the
| relevant topics without having to simplify things for
| people outside that group.
|
| For a reverse proxy, you would want a computer capable of
| the encryption methods the modern web's security standards
| demand and to install a web server on it which you can
| access from the older computer. The server computer does
| not have to be fancy at all. A Raspberry Pi can do it. For
| software I would recommend either Caddy
| (https://caddyserver.com/docs/quick-starts/reverse-proxy)
| or NGINX (https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/web-
| server/reverse-...). It can be rather complicated and
| difficult for someone to do, especially if you're not a web
| programmer.
|
| If both that and upgrading your computer aren't in the
| cards at the moment, I would think using the recently-
| discontinued browser Classilla is your best bet:
| http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ It at least
| supports some deprecated forms of TLS & SSL. I hear there's
| a fork called Phoenix that kind of supports TLS 1.2 even.
|
| (I would recommend using the most updated browser
| regardless.)
| swinnipeg wrote:
| I like it!
|
| Sites like NHL.com or ESPN.com are borderline hostile navigating
| this info.
|
| It is reminiscent of the morning sports pages in the newspaper I
| would read each morning as a kid.
|
| The one improvement would be if there was page that summarized
| the league. i.e. Click on NHL and it lists scores, games that
| day, standings, and possibly scoring leaders. That would be
| capture all of the important points on one clean page, as the
| newspaper used to.
| abcanthur wrote:
| Great site, I've been using it for months. It's a really
| different and richer experience at night when the games are in
| progress. There are added features for the big leagues, such as
| the NBA games feature a game flow graph of the scoring margin.
| It truly shines when you're at a sold out NBA game, you can
| barely get a tweet out due to the crowd size, but you can still
| refresh the box score of your own game in <second to check on
| foul trouble.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| That is very neat, and great use of a low bandwidth style
| site. On the other hand at the NBA games I've been to they
| have the box score on the jumbotron.
| abcanthur wrote:
| true, but usually only for players currently on the court
| and who knows what direction you'll have to rubberneck to
| read it. This is one instance where I like mixing the small
| mobile screen w my real world view, it's an augmented
| reality!
| warmwaffles wrote:
| > Sites like NHL.com
|
| Unfortunately, in order for me to avoid that hell, I use the
| mobile app and wish I didn't have to.
| brewdad wrote:
| I've made CBS Sports my go to for scores. It loads quickly (for
| me at least), it's easy to read. They provide betting lines
| right up until game start (if you are into that) and even tell
| you what network is broadcasting the game, including
| competitors.
|
| https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/scoreboard/
| CJefferson wrote:
| This does look really nice, and the author should be proud,
| however I wanted to make a general comment (which isn't a critism
| of this website).
|
| If you aim is to help people who want pure text-based interfaces
| (the blind in particular), this is much worse than a proper HTML
| page, which they can easily explore by headers. Well-formed HTML
| is actually one of the most accessible formats, and drawing boxes
| with CSS (rather than ASCII art) is also much better, as a screen
| reader would try to read the art, and get confused by boxes next
| to each other.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Why not also include an audio file generated from the text of
| the page with TTS.
| paxys wrote:
| There is no need to include it, since that's the point of
| screen readers and all other client-side assistive software.
|
| The problem is that in this page's case all of the decorative
| text like borders will be "read out" as well.
| lucasmullens wrote:
| I believe vision-impaired users would greatly prefer their
| own TTS, in part because many can listen at 5-10x speed since
| they're so used to hearing that particular voice.
| altairprime wrote:
| To clarify: Are you indicating that, as a user dependent on
| screen readers, that this site is difficult to use for you?
|
| Do other users who depend on screen readers have an experience
| they're willing to share about visiting this site?
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| This is something that frustrates me: it's actually really
| hard to design for screenreaders because it's hard to
| actually check the results in a free/volunteer context. So
| you often just have to just hope you're being "semantic"
| enough.
|
| And I did try to use Orca but I just could not get it to
| work, the TTS service was sulkily disinclined to accept any
| requests.
| easrng wrote:
| Firefox's Accessibility tree inspector is nice.
| CJefferson wrote:
| Nowadays it's really easy to check on mac + windows, as the
| built in stuff is "good enough", particularly if you use
| the OSes default browser (Safari and edge respectively).
|
| I realise that doesn't help Linux/BSD users.
| [deleted]
| CJefferson wrote:
| As someone with friends who use screen readers, I notice when
| sites are close, but not quite there. Many websites are just
| a lost cause, but this is very close to very accessible :)
|
| The main limitation is it would be nice if the sections were
| labelled, either with a <hx>, or <section>, to make it easier
| to jump around the page.
|
| The ascii art gets read, which is a bit annoying, aria-
| hidden="true" will make the ascii art not get read out as
| text.
|
| The best option is to try out with a screen reader -- on both
| windows + mac a decent screen reader is built in (it's worth
| best with the default browser, safari on mac, edge on
| windows). I'm not expert on screen reading on Linux.
| paxys wrote:
| To add - the two aren't mutually exclusive. You can have page
| layouts with divs and correct tags that screen readers can
| understand AND draw ascii borders around it.
| caslon wrote:
| Couldn't he just want... a plain-text interface?
|
| Why are we assigning motives to creations where none is stated?
| ASCII art loads fast and the miniscule stylesheet and script
| barely slows anything down.
|
| Plenty of people who aren't disabled like minimalist
| interfaces, because minimalist interfaces tend to stay
| relatively static.
|
| Plus, in this case, the main utility seems to be that there's a
| _single_ place you can check the results of any mainstream
| sports event, rather than going through the million hoops to
| get search engines to give you a page where you can find
| results.
| TAKEMYMONEY wrote:
| This site is HTML, replacing <div> with <table> wouldn't
| change that. Tabular _data_ can still be plain text. It 's
| just rendered in tables instead of divs and spans.
|
| Plain text is good because it
|
| 1. Loads fast 2. Can be parsed easily
|
| <table>s load just as fast, and can be parsed much faster by
| humans and computers alike.
|
| Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it
| correctly. This is all costs of markup without any benefit.
| Bring accessibility in the mix (which we should always do)
| and it's a non-starter.
| yupper32 wrote:
| > Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use
| it correctly.
|
| Says who? The owner of the website here owes us nothing.
| TAKEMYMONEY wrote:
| I mean it as a constructive criticism, not a pull
| request. It's a cool project (enough that I wanted to see
| how it's built).
| [deleted]
| caslon wrote:
| Personally, I love the site, and I'm glad it is the way it
| is: It looks and feels better than any plausible
| alternative. It sure seems like it has all of the benefits
| and only one of the drawbacks (vaguely inaccessible).
|
| A person can just make something for their own enjoyment.
| It's not the end of the world.
| TAKEMYMONEY wrote:
| The primary drawback is that it's not plain text, so it
| doesn't have the benefit that a plain text format would.
| bmj wrote:
| This isn't "plain text." It's still laid out via HTML (and
| CSS). HTML tables somehow get a bad rap, but they are
| _perfect_ for tabular data, which most of this data displayed
| on this particular site is. A proper "plain text" interface
| in HTML would be the data wrapped in a PRE tag, right?
|
| To be clear, regardless of the HTML layout, I do like this
| site, because I can quickly and easily check NHL scores and
| standings without the cruft that comes from most sporting
| websites.
| Zababa wrote:
| > HTML tables somehow get a bad rap, but they are perfect
| for tabular data, which most of this data displayed on this
| particular site is.
|
| For me, not supporting some kind of sorting natively makes
| them not perfect. It's really important for me when reading
| tabular data to have that option.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Noticed NCAA basketball on there -- if anyone trying to keep up
| with March Madness, this twitter bot is handy for games going
| down to the wire: https://twitter.com/tothewirebot
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| It should output with curl in plaintext as easy as
| https://wttr.in/
| williamsmj wrote:
| See also http://www.ismytrainfucked.com/ for NYC subway updates.
| nvr219 wrote:
| I hate using google but the experience of getting MLB scores and
| game status from google is so much better than actual MLB
| websites. I would totally use this instead!!
| reaperducer wrote:
| Also one of the few things that Siri seems to be good at.
|
| As long as you are only interested in certain very large sports
| teams. (She has no idea there are any minor league baseball
| teams.)
|
| But at least if you ask for a score and the game hasn't started
| yet, she's smart enough to tell you the time it starts, rather
| than giving you the scores for yesterday's game. Though, maybe
| she should do both for completeness.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| I remember back in the earliest days of mobile "internet" (when
| WAP had a more innocent meaning) there were sites/services like
| this you could access from a Nokia phone. Due for a comeback?
| kevincox wrote:
| Does it really need to override my font size? 13px is too small
| for my display. Of course removing the override breaks it because
| it has a max-width set in px. But why does it have a max-width?
| It is important not to have long lines of text but there are no
| long lines on this page, each box has it's own size. So by
| removing font-size and max-width rules this is far more readable
| for me. And while I'm at it don't force Courier, not a great
| font, just use monospace and get the user's default monospace
| font.
|
| But I find this quite funny, while it is obviously going for a
| plain-text appearance it actually uses javascript and a lot of
| "complex" CSS like flexbox making it actually scale nicely to
| different size screens once the max-width is removed. But if the
| implementation is actually using these complex features why
| target a plain-text look? Maybe it is a personal preference but
| for me simple line borders are a lot less noisy and distracting
| than +------+.
| lelandfe wrote:
| > Does it really need to override my font size? 13px is too
| small for my display
|
| The advent of good browser-based zooming has made non-default
| font-size users like yourself a small segment. The days of
| having to author _everything_ in em /rem is mostly over -
| keeping everything scalable was tedious and prone to issues.
|
| I'd bet you encounter issues regularly: explicit font sizes on
| a root element are a ubiquitous practice. Examples include HN
| itself, Google, MDN, Apple, etc.
|
| That being said, 13px is quite small. I'd encourage at least a
| 16px minimum. But for now, simply zoom in with Cmd/Ctrl-+
| TAKEMYMONEY wrote:
| How do you persist zoom settings for every website across
| browsers and devices?
| lelandfe wrote:
| Every major browser has default zoom settings which will
| apply to all sites. For example:
|
| Chrome: Settings > Appearance > Page zoom
|
| Firefox: Settings > General > Zoom
|
| iOS Safari: Settings > Safari > Page Zoom > Other Websites
| remram wrote:
| A default zoom setting that is global to the browser does
| not in any way fix the problem of different websites
| using different font sizes.
| lelandfe wrote:
| It does if you have a huge screen or feel that all sites'
| fonts are too small, right? Anyway, every browser I use
| also persists zoom settings chosen for each site.
| TAKEMYMONEY wrote:
| On mobile devices as well? Genuinely asking. I keep a
| battery of custom CSS files for every site I visit _just_
| to keep the text settings in sync across OSes, browsers
| and devices. HN 's CSS for example is...quaint I guess
| but incredibly antiquated.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Here are my settings on Safari iOS, which get added as
| you change font sizes across sites:
| https://i.imgur.com/w2lJev4.png. You can see that I
| clearly agree with you regarding HN :)
| kevincox wrote:
| I'm sure I have "problems" quite often but the sites listed
| are quite readable. Sure, I would prefer them to use my
| default font size but something with their contrast, font or
| otherwise seems to make it not stand out.
|
| > non-default font-size users like yourself
|
| What does this even mean? The default font is being
| overridden and irreverent here. Are you suggesting that there
| is a default default font that is expected to be used across
| all browsers?
| jstanley wrote:
| I think the suggestion is that instead of using your
| computer with a font size that is comfortable to read, you
| should leave all the rest of the fonts on your system tiny,
| but zoom in your browser so that web pages are readable.
| lelandfe wrote:
| > Are you suggesting that there is a default default font
|
| Yes, the `font-size` value when you freshly install the
| browser: 16px. This changeable value had a lot of
| historical importance, as it was the only way users could
| scale sites up.
|
| Good Samaritan CSS authors had to write not only all font-
| sizes in percentages or em's to respect that value (rem
| came later) but also think about things like min/max-
| widths, padding/margin, breakpoints, etc. Folks would later
| use pixel-to-em converter functions in early tools like
| Bourbon and Compass. You can still find old polemics on
| authoring explicit pixel values from folks like Jakob
| Nielsen[0].
|
| These days, Cmd-+ in browsers _zooms_ instead of scales
| font-size, and things just work out nicely: padding and
| margins magically grow, breakpoints trigger as expected,
| etc. As a result, direct font-size adjustments have gone
| from living in the taskbar in IE4 to being buried in Google
| Chrome in Preferences > Appearance > Font Size.
|
| In my opinion, it's for the best. Users aren't left out in
| the cold by nonconforming CSS, and CSS devs don't have to
| do battle with scalable values.
|
| [0] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/let-users-control-
| font-size...
| sigzero wrote:
| I believe it just describes the display of the data (i.e. plain
| text).
| [deleted]
| jdauriemma wrote:
| This is great! I wonder what needs to happen in order to get
| `curl plaintextsports.com` to Just Work, similar to `curl
| wttr.in`.
|
| EDIT: After inspecting the HTML, I think Plain Text Sports is a
| bit of a misnomer. With that name, I might have expected a lot of
| <pre> tags in the markup, but there are no none to be found.
| Instead, CSS is used for the layout, even line breaks. So,
| Hypertext Sports?
| grenoire wrote:
| Removed <head> and added font-family: monospace to the <body>.
| It's definitely not plaintext.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Yeah, I thought we'd see the results inside of a <pre> tag.
| Instead, the HTML is empty.
|
| Looks like a single page app.
|
| $ curl plaintextsports.com % Total %
| Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time
| Current Dload Upload
| Total Spent Left Speed
|
| 100 183 100 183 0 0 1060 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 1063
| <html> <head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head> <body
| bgcolor="white"> <center><h1>301 Moved
| Permanently</h1></center> <hr><center>CloudFront</center>
| </body> </html>
| jdauriemma wrote:
| Adding `https://` will get you the HTML, but there's very
| little plain text to parse. The markup's layout depends on
| CSS.
| antidaily wrote:
| This rules -- but needs to actually be plain text.
| compsciphd wrote:
| Back in 1997 I was studying overseas and we didn't have internet
| access, but we did have e-mail access over uucp. There was a
| service back then which would end you a text mode version of a
| web page (which would probably be much harder today, as users of
| w3m or links could attest) and we'd have it setup to email us the
| scores every night.
|
| 25 year younger me would have loved this site for that. :)
| anthk wrote:
| Today you have RSS2email which is similar and it can be perfect
| to share news between retro-nerds.
| once_inc wrote:
| This feels very much like teletekst, which is arguably the best
| thing on TV worldwide.
| bluedino wrote:
| Always liked these for having in a terminal window at jobs that
| didn't allow websites like ESPN.com
|
| Always wished for one with play-by-play
| _joel wrote:
| Should be called Plain Text American Sports, but fair effort
| nonetheless
| goblinux wrote:
| Beautiful. I love it! Dark mode is beautiful. So very well done.
| This went right to the top of my bookmark list.
|
| Only constructive feedback would be if it can better fill a
| normal 16:9 desktop monitor - it looks optimized for mobile,
| which is great - but it's too small and narrow for keeping open
| on the PC
|
| If you like MLB - this reminds me of Playball which runs in the
| terminal.
|
| https://github.com/paaatrick/playball
| dogline wrote:
| That URL for playball is cool. Thanks!
| lc9er wrote:
| This is really great. Thanks for posting it.
| h3mb3 wrote:
| This made me remember that quite a lot of people in some
| countries still use teletext for sports cores. Similar to this
| site, it's fast, simple and very much low-def. In Finland (where
| teletext was big back in the day), you can still access web
| versions of the main TV channels' teletext services [1][2]. Not
| sure about other countries.
|
| Even if you don't follow sports that much (like me), it's also a
| great way to browse news in general - without any clutter or
| clickbait, as the technology is so restricted. I've noticed it's
| so much easier to avoid doomscrolling traps compared to regular
| websites, especially during the latest global horrors.
|
| [1] https://yle.fi/aihe/tekstitv
|
| [2] https://www.mtvtekstikanava.fi/new2008/100-01.htm
| pantulis wrote:
| Spaniard here. My dad still uses teletext for that, even though
| he is more or less capable with a computer. He loves just
| typing the page numbers and watching the scores updated in
| almost realtime.
| hnarn wrote:
| As a Swede, seeing Americans react to this website is
| interesting. Sweden introduced "Text-TV" in 1979 (it was
| pioneered by the BBC in the early 70's I believe), which means
| that reading text based sports results on your TV is a completely
| ubiquitous cultural phenomenon for anyone who grew up in Sweden
| in the 80's, the 90's and all the way up to when the Internet and
| smartphones took over.
|
| Swedish state television (SVT) still provide "Text-TV" online at
| https://www.svt.se/text-tv -- many Swedes including myself still
| know some of the numbers by heart, 100 being the index and 377
| being the favorite page of dads all over the country (live sports
| results).
|
| I vividly remember being a kid (before DSL broadband or even
| dial-up was a thing in my life) flipping through the pages and
| guessing numbers between 100 and 999 to see where I would end up,
| long before I would end up doing the same thing on the early
| Internet.
|
| SVT's "Text-TV" is to my knowledge still the worlds oldest,
| operational service of its kind.
| mstngl wrote:
| Same here in Germany, where regular operation of Teletext (or
| called "Videotext" here) started in 1979[1] and is still a
| thing. Surprisingly, I experience deaf people in my sphere
| using it. Of course, all the information is available on
| websites as well, but the strict form and reduced text amount
| per information in Teletext seem to make it very accessible for
| those who struggle with complexity of written language.
|
| [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext#Deutschland
| hnarn wrote:
| I think a common use case for this type of technology was
| subtitles for deaf people, so it's possible that they still
| use it out of habit. These days I think subtitles are
| probably sent to most TVs in a more modern fashion.
| Someone wrote:
| > SVT's "Text-TV" is to my knowledge still the worlds oldest,
| operational service of its kind.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_teletext_services says
| _"The Netherlands has run a regular Teletext service since the
| end of 1977 on the public broadcasting channels"_. That would
| make that older. Ceefax was from 1974, so it seems there's room
| for an even older still operating one.
| hnarn wrote:
| Ceefax was shut down in 2012.[1] I have no idea about the
| Dutch one, it's possible that it's older.
|
| edit: According to this site[2] the Dutch teletext was
| broadcast "on the open network" on April 1, 1980. There's
| also a Swedish source claiming that Swedish Text-TV is the
| oldest in the world.[3]
|
| [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20032882
|
| [2]: https://over-nos-
| nl.translate.goog/organisatie/geschiedenis-...
|
| [3]: https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/1216116 "idag har
| faktiskt Sverige varldens aldsta annu aktiva Text-TV"
| Maursault wrote:
| I like plain text. But this site is not plain text. It is HTML
| and css. <head><meta name="referrer"
| content="origin"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-
| width, initial-scale=1.0"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
| href="news.css?QZejSKY7mNWXnObVdaSN"> <link
| rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico">
| <title>Submissions from plaintextsports.com | Hacker
| News</title></head>
| sumnole wrote:
| I was wondering what kind of sports could be played through plain
| text.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Code Golf
| wallawe wrote:
| Where do you get your data from? I've found sports data
| (especially odds/lines) to be overly expensive when trying to
| build hobby apps.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Betting data is expensive because people are building
| trading/arb bots with that data.
| jaywalk wrote:
| ESPN has a surprisingly comprehensive JSON API that isn't
| locked down. If you're only using it for a hobby app, you won't
| run into any issues. It's been around for quite a while.
| zouhair wrote:
| Shutdown for almost 8 years[0].
|
| [0]: http://www.espn.com/apis/devcenter/blog/read/publicretir
| emen...
| mad_vill wrote:
| I thought they shutdown their public api.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Officially, yes. But here's the NFL scores API, for
| example: http://site.api.espn.com/apis/site/v2/sports/footb
| all/nfl/sc...
|
| It's a "private" API for their website, but like I said
| it's been around for a while and using it in a hobby app
| isn't going to be an issue. Using it commercially is just
| begging for trouble, though.
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