".txt" is also a good idea for content-heavy pages. Maybe ".md" too? I may try.
URLs are text. Anchor tags are text. The "link" part is a function of the content viewer. text/plain just happens to not trigger that function in most browsers, but there's no guarantee it won't. If I paste that plain text into an email, it's likely my client or the the receiver's is going to "linkify" it.
Interesting to see how the original creator of Markdown uses it.
I'm presuming that's the version he edits and not output automatically converted from an intermediary representation.
We've hardly scratched the surface here.
(Now I want to make a TUI site.)
Not technically plaintext (in the MIME type sense), but still very lightweight, especially when compared to other news sites.
Thanks for putting together this list, it would be nice to add a short summary next to each link.
It's clearly intentional, but I just can't think of a reason to intentionally make your website this unusable?
For most SSG (Static site generators) I’ve seen that take a plain text to html conversion, they usually only serve up .html
Wondering out loud if this would be a useful and desirable addition for SSG tools to have the option to serve up say .html and a .md (or .txt or whatever).
Am I missing something? Be a good idea/feature yeah?
If your browser is rendering plaintext documents in a way that's unreadable, that's a failure of your web browser to serve as an effective user agent for your needs.
(People shoot down the analogous argument for changing the base formatting of text/html, because changing the base UA styles would throw brittle old stylesheets out of whack. But plaintext doesn't have stylesheets that could be thrown out-of-whack.)
I never knew Google invented the Zodiac.
https://web.archive.org/web/20020329105739/http://berkshireh...
Mine defaulted to drunk for some reason and it's so horrible I didn't even realise I could change it!
(I've argued and lost that fight, more often than won it.)
To me, having only text as the output with no ads, videos, or images is “text-only”. It doesn’t matter how it’s presented as long as it’s just text.
But I also see your perspective. You want plain defaults with white background color, black foreground color, and no formatting.
> The rules are simple - content which has the MIME type of text/plain. No HTML, no multimedia, no RTF, no XML, no ANSI colour escape sequences.
Your definition is fine for you, but it’s not what TFA is about.
A couple of years ago, I started serving my blog posts as plain text. Add .txt to the end of any URl and get a deliciously lo-fi, UTF-8, mono[chrome|space] alternative.
Here's this post in plain text - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites.txt
Obviously a webpage without links is like a fish without a bicycle, but the joy of the web is that there are no gatekeepers. People can try new concepts and, if enough people join in, it becomes normal. I'm not saying the plain-text is the best web experience. But it is an experience. Perfect if you like your browsing fast, simple, and readable. There are no cookie banners, pop-ups, permission prompts, autoplaying videos, or garish colour schemes.
I'm certainly not the first person to do this, so I thought it might be fun to gather a list of websites which you browse in text-only mode. If you know of any more - including your own site - please drop a comment in the box!
.txt to any URl..text to any URl..html with .txt.?action=source to any URl..txt to any URl..md to any URl or send an HTTP Accept for Markdown.If you'd like to add a site, please get in touch. The rules are simple - content which has the MIME type of text/plain. No HTML, no multimedia, no RTF, no XML, no ANSI colour escape sequences.
Emoji are fine though; emoji are cool.