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by throwaway2046 162 days ago
Offering a plain text version of your website may seem like a novel idea nowadays but I remember a time when pretty much every web page had a printer-friendly version with little to no formatting. I suppose printing web pages has become passé, that is unless you're printing a food recipe.

Thanks for putting together this list, it would be nice to add a short summary next to each link.
3 comments
fhdkweig 162 days ago
I recall on the morning of September 11, 2001, CNN had to completely redesign their site into a text-only version (no images or videos) just to keep up with the strain. Slashdot.org was the only site I went to that was able to keep functioning as-is.
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lisp2240 162 days ago
https://lite.cnn.com/
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djeastm 162 days ago
I use this all the time. I wish every media outlet had the same.
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kiicia 162 days ago
Reason is a bit different - print version was built in adblocker so they got rid of it…
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al_borland 162 days ago
I have to wonder if printing has gone down in popularity, in part, because so many websites handle it so poorly these days. I will sometimes "print" to PDF to save an article I want to read or reference, so I don't have to worry about the site disappearing on me. The quality of these PDFs has dropped dramatically over the years. With some sites it's almost not even worth it.
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shakna 162 days ago
On several of my previous projects I've been tasked with making the print broken, not just "disabled", to try and force people into the "happy path" where there's a download button. Despite the beforeprint event that would let me trigger the same process.

(I've argued and lost that fight, more often than won it.)

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al_borland 162 days ago
In these fights, did they give the justification for the download button? I'm continuously frustrated by these types of things that go out of their way to break native functionality. Is there a way where they can get extra information and tracking on the user; is that the goal?

To me the "happy path" is the one the user would naturally take, without needing to learn the quirks of each site.

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shakna 162 days ago
Well, not to entirely leak what I do but the justification is... Salesforce. [0] Omni-anything is a painful, overcomplicated, JS and DB intense process. Generating some PDFs can take in excess of thirty seconds, just because it hits five different objects. And can only be triggered by JS.

[0] https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=ind.sf_contract...

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