Plain Text or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Lose the Guff

Jun 19, 2018

GDPR kicked in recently, and mostly it’s had a negative impact for those of us in Europe trying to view the web in Europe, but it has also lead me to discover something I thought was long forgotten. Something that made reading news sites a halfway decent experience, no auto loading videos and no full page overlays asking you to sign up to their newsletter. That’s right kids, plain text websites are back, and they’re the best experience I’ve had online in a long time.

So, this all started when I wanted to read an article I saw on Reddit, an NPR article, and I was greeted by the usual: “We use cookies and need your consent to continue”, but with a slight twist. I was informed that there’s a plain text version of the site available. A version of the site without auto playing videos. A version of the site without unwanted adverts consuming bandwidth. A version of the website I’d actually love to use. So I thought I’d give it a go, it couldn’t be any worse than the existing experience. Lo and behold, it was a pretty refreshing experience and one of the first times I’d actually read an article rather than skimming through it while being constantly distracted. The lack of images could be potentially very irritating in some articles, and I’m certainly not saying it’s the greatest user experience, but it’s certainly better than the defacto standard. But I’m not just here to talk about the experience, that’s really down to your preference as a user and your willingness to look at something a little uglier.

I was pretty intrigued to know the difference in page size and load times: No images, no videos, no Javascript libraries or advertising services to be loaded and no expensive rendering logic. You might be surprised to know that the average web page is now larger than the entirety of ID softwares Doom, and there’s no sign that there’s any intentions to change that (Thanks Ronan). Now in comparrison, a lot of the articles on the plain text NPR site clock in at under 30KB, and their richer counter parts weigh in at around 2.5MB. Some quick maths: 83x larger, so already a huge positive for those on limited bandwidth or companies worried about their data transfers. But what about load times? Search Engines are taking page load times pretty seriously now days for their SEO rankings, the faster the better. On my connection and machine the average finished loading time for the plaintext version of the site was well under 800ms and the heavier version of the site came in at around 3s, so nearly 3 times faster.

Now to most of us in Europe and places with reliable internet connections this isn’t too much of a problem. Sure it could be faster and loading libraries to deliver unwated adverts and continually track you isn’t ideal, but there’s certainly bigger things going on in your life right now. But what about those with less stable connections, and less reliable access to the internet. During my time at Bliss we’ve worked with a number of clients who face this problem, mostly humanitarian workers and organisations, ones working out in the field where they’re lucky to get 30Mb of data transferred in an hour. Just taking a quick look at some sites that report on humanitarian news and I’m already seeing an average page size of over 3.5MB and load times upwards of 4s. Again, not a problem for my personal connection, but for anybody running a connection of a lesser quality this could prove a significant problem.

I can’t speak for my complete understanding of this topic, and with regards to user experience and web design there’s definitely more qualified people to be sharing their thoughts… But I’ve already written this and it’s not the worst thing I’ve written. It’s also kind of a little bit of self promotion, I’ve just launched this site and I’m focusing on content over anything else. Nothing to distract you and nothing to try and harvest your personal data, just my thoughts, opinions and anything else I think is worth sharing.

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