This site is now a “shinobi website”

Having no URLs clickable as hyperlinks is the literal antithesis of the web.

Whilst i like the sentiment being a massive fan of minimalism i don't understand why Markdown to HTML with an ultra-simple stylesheet would not be a better solution. Trivial to strip Markdown to plain text and easy to convert to HTML, best of both worlds. Let the user choose how they want to consume the content either via RSS, markdown (or plain text) or formatted HTML.

If you&#x27;ve got a script to generate well formed RSS from plain text it&#x27;s almost zero extra effort to generate HTML from that same source text. Then you get all sorts of hypermedia features like hyperlinks. This plain text page has a bunch of links and footnotes that are not being well served by the medium.<p>RSS is fine and dandy but a majority of your audience may not even have a feed reader. Most readers will detect a site&#x27;s feeds from metadata pointing to feeds. They won&#x27;t be able to do that with plain text.<p>Even if you just stick with default user agent styling, a viewport meta tag can make content far more readable. There&#x27;s no need to do anything more complicated than unstyled HTML with a few meta tags to get a much richer experience than plain text.<p>Literal plain text is an aesthetic but a readability problem on modern devices. No one is primarily reading on 80 character terminals. Unless your plain text has hard line breaks to enforce a column size it&#x27;s going to break at a browser&#x27;s viewport boundaries. On wide screen displays you end up with uncomfortably wide column width and on mobiles you&#x27;ll get odd text sizes because the browser&#x27;s viewport is virtual pixels that map is varying ways to screen pixels.

I feel like something along the lines of Gemini would be most appropriate here.<p>You&#x27;d still have the minimalist approach (and I am sure that you could create a shell script to help you manage it as well) but you have the benefit of a <i>minimal</i> smattering of formatting to help the user - so e.g. actual links, headings etc.<p>This feels a little too far gone in my opinion - copy-pasting URLs etc is a step too far for me.

This is really cool. It&#x27;s &quot;Bauhaus as hell&quot;.<p>However, plaintext is painful to read in the browser. Painful. Pain which could be alleviated with 4-5 lines of CSS and still maintain it&#x27;s shinobi status.

I totally get the minimalist approach to websites, but using plain text instead of semantic HTML elements means giving up accessibility. People who rely on screen readers will not be able to read your content in a pleasant way.

About &quot;shinobi website&quot;.[0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shinobi.website&#x2F;index.txt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shinobi.website&#x2F;index.txt</a>

Adding a XSLT stylesheet to that XML feed, will make it also readable inside browser.

Interesting idea to go full plaintext. Especially the commenting idea sounds wild.<p>While I&#x27;m generally all for minimalism and like reading plain text documents that follow some simple formatting scheme, the one thing that annoys me about it is links not being clickable, at least on mobile. I think on desktop there&#x27;s actually a &quot;visit url&quot; Item in the right click menu, but no such thing on mobile (Firefox). You long-press the url, then it selects part of the it, manually fiddle with the markers left and right to get the full url selected, Copy, tap into address bar and paste. Is there a better way?

Minimalism is a good thing, I like it. But the invention of hyperlinks is also a good thing. I think making urls clickable would be a nice improvement.

Bad idea, I will like to be able to click on links, and see pictures. ASCII art is fun, but cannot be a staple.

this is how i prefer to consume content (minus the non-clickable link stuff) but realize i am in the minority.

Now, one could find some middle ground by making the bare text function as an org-mode[1] outline.<p>Then, client code could make the content more navigable.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;orgmode.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;orgmode.org&#x2F;</a>

To try this, are there any webapp RSS readers besides tt-rss.org that can be used without registration?

Can we get like a super-shinobi-version with links or markdown ?