Other text-only websites
------------------------

Terence Eden's come up with a list of other text-only websites:

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites/

As you might expect, none of those listed are ENTIRELY plain text like this one (ignoring its feed,
which is XML), but it's still pretty cool to see.

Of course, a lot of Gemlogs etc. ought to qualify! The primary markup format of Gemini (Gemtext) is
pretty-much Markdown with fewer features... which in turn is basically plain text. It's certainly a
format that a human can READ as plain text.

But then... that was - or the case with HTML 1.0 too! Here's a document making use of 7 (of the ~18
original) elements that were present in HTML as it was first described in:
https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/Tags.html

> <TITLE>Beans on toast</TITLE>
>
> <H1>Beans on toast</H1>
>
> <P>A recipe for when you just can't be bothered<BR>
> By Dan Q
>
> <H2>Ingredients</H2>
> <UL>
>   <LI>Baked beans
>   <LI>Bread
>   <LI>Butter
> </UL>
>
> <H2>Steps</H2>
> <OL>
>   <LI>Heat the baked beans in a pan
>   <LI>Meanwhile, toast the bread in a toaster
>   <LI>Butter the toasted bread
>   <LI>Serve with the warmed baked beans on top

Even without any helpful affordances in spacing/layout... that page is pretty-much human-readable,
right? Here's the closest approximation of the same thing, but in Gemtext, for comparison:

> # Beans on toast
>
> A recipe for when you just can't be bothered
>
> By Dan Q
>
> ## Ingredients
> * Baked beans
> * Bread
> * Butter
>
> ## Steps
> * Heat the baked beans in a pan
> * Meanwhile, toast the bread in a toaster
> * Butter the toasted bread
> * Serve with the warmed baked beans on top

Certainly the latter is MORE human-readable than the former, and MORE like plain text... but is it
really THAT much more like plain text? You could argue that no, the (very basic) HTML is almost as
readable!

The lesson is, I guess, that "human-readability" of plain text is a spectrum: something a bit like
this:

  <--  More human-readable                                              Less human-readable  -->  
|-----------|-----------|-----------|------------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|
Plain text       Gemtext       Markdown        BBCode         HTML 1.0         Modern HTML     RTF

Where do you draw the line? Do you agree with Terence's approach (which seemingly places it around
the "BBCode" mark)? Do you agree with my ordering?

Oh yeah: and Happy New Year!

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This post appeared on https://textplain.blog/