from Hacker News

Show HN: I made my website plain text only

by aswinmohanme on 4/2/22, 5:39 PM with 4 comments

• by Kwpolska on 4/2/22, 5:47 PM

  Terribly inconvenient for actual usage. To use links on your site, I need to highlight expressions in brackets by mouse (and I need to click-and-drag, and I need to be exact at it), then I need to copy this value, parse relative links, and paste it in appropriately.

  Unusable from a keyboard (on a standard configuration of Firefox at least; I suppose there’s an option to allow for more precise highlighting from a keyboard). Probably unusable for visually impaired users, definitely not pleasant to listen to.

  If you want minimalism, fine, but you should use basic HTML (like the HTML you’d get from any Markdown renderrer and your .txt files…). With clickable links, Tab-and-hit-Enter links, visually-impaired-friendly links, and so on.

• by aswinmohanme on 4/2/22, 5:45 PM

  Out of curiosity I converted my blog and blog posts to a collection of text files. I thought first about making a simple HTML file, but then thought if I have HTML there is nothing stopping me from adding CSS and JS to it. I wanted a bare minimum way for my writing to exist on the web and work well on the command line.

  Since we can't add links to text files, they follow the markdown format of links [link](url) where you have to manually copy paste the URL in the URL bar. The text is hard wrapped at 80 chars, and no indentation is used since it messes up the look on mobile. I love it, what do you people think ? Yeah or neh ?

• by vohu43 on 4/3/22, 1:26 PM

  Interesting idea, but yeah since you cannot click on the links nobody will want to use it.