[iLemming]

> The reading experience is abhorrent

Nothing you read in the browser can provide ultimately great and hands-down the best reading experience equally for everybody - the modern web model is inherently at odds with that. A plain HTML page with no CSS is a near-perfect reading experience. The problem is that almost nobody ships that, because the web also became a publishing platform where authors compete for attention. A plain-text protocol under user control is closer to "best reading experience for everybody". The web could be that. It mostly isn't.

I stopped trying to read long articles in the browser. Why would I do that, if I can easily extract all the relevant, plain text (and even structured one) and read it in my editor instead? Where I have control over fonts, colors, navigation, etc. The browser is a delivery mechanism, not a reading environment. Treating it as one is a habit, not a necessity.

Long ago I stopped trying to type anything longer than three words anywhere but my editor. Of course, why wouldn't I? It already has everything I need - spellchecking, thesaurus, etymology lookup, translation, access to all my notes, LLM integration, etc. Try it one day - it's enormously liberating experience. And then maybe you'd stop reading long texts in the browser as well.

[autoexec]

> A plain HTML page with no CSS is a near-perfect reading experience. The problem is that almost nobody ships that, because the web also became a publishing platform where authors compete for attention.

They don't ship it because of greed. They only want your attention because of greed. They only infest their website with ads because of greed.

> The browser is a delivery mechanism,

http is a delivery mechanism. The browser is a user agent. It's supposed to display content according to the preferences of the user. If your browser isn't doing that for you it's time to find a new browser or beat the one you have into submission until it behaves. "reader mode" is a useful compromise.

[iLemming]

> It's supposed to display content according to the preferences of the user.

That's right, the original idea was exactly about that, but like I said - in practice that is no longer a thing.

Using the editor for reading any content is enormously underrated. Check this out - this entire thread opens in my editor as an outline with nested structure. Meaning that all the regular outline operations are available to me - folding, imenu (interactive TOC), narrowing, quick search, contextual search, pattern-based search, sparse-tree search.

Extracting all the URLs on the page while ignoring HN-internal ones is a single keypress for me - there's a link to a YT video - I can watch it, controlling the playback directly from my editor, I can extract transcript and summarize it with an LLM request - all without opening new tabs, without switching focus.

I can narrow on the sub-thread, or select a region and export only that part to a pdf, gfm, html or LaTeX. The possibilities are virtually unlimited. A web browser - even with three hundred different extensions won't let me have complete and utter control over plain text - it's just not designed for anything like that.

[polaris64]

I'm assuming you use Emacs? Are you using a special "hacker news mode" or something more generic?

[iLemming]

HN threads is probably not the best example because the site is pretty readable already. But it's not that difficult to fetch a thread and render it in the Org-mode outline format. nhreader.el¹ does that. For reading articles I just use eww. it has (eww-readable) that removes all the fluff like banners. The trade-off that eww (by design) doesn't do any javascript. That makes it difficult to use with websites with client-site rendering (React, et al.). For that, I have a little automation elisp² that uses OSA (JXA) and extracts the rendered content off the page. I need to figure something similar for Linux, but it's not so straightforward, the only way I know is to run the browser with the debugger port.

¹ https://github.com/thanhvg/emacs-hnreader

² https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/blob/main/modules/custom/we...

[uxcolumbo]

Can you share your setup how to achieve what you described? I'm curious.

[iLemming]

see the adjacent thread

[someguyiguess]

> Why would I do that, if I can easily extract all the relevant, plain text (and even structured one) and read it in my editor instead?

Because that’s an enormous pain in the ass. Not scalable at all.

[itsdavesanders]

Its pretty easy with a system like Readwise. Yes, that's ANOTHER system, but its one system to quickly just add articles like these to an inbox and read them another time, in plain text.

Of course, it doesn't work 100% and certain sites are hostile to it and do stupid javascript tricks "for the views".

Mostly, I use it to put it on a reading list later, and to get around really, really abusive ad driven sites.

[iLemming]

> Its pretty easy

100%. One can use mozilla/readability to extract the content. Even if you think that would require some effort, think about it - you have to do it ONLY once and never deal with that kind of annoyance EVER again. It really baffles me seeing devs complaining about shit like that. Why? Why won't they figure out a better way? You're a friggin' programmer - computers have to obey your will. You spend your lifetime staring at the screen, reading and editing text. Why not do it on your own terms? Even if it takes some effort, why choose to be henpecked by someone else's rules FOREVER?

[iLemming]

I beg to differ. You clearly misinterpret what I'm talking about. Please expand on "scalable", what do you mean by that?

[kode-targz]

do you use emacs?

[iLemming]

I do, but nothing stopping anyone from doing the same thing with nvim or vscode. I'm pretty sure, for vscode there probably extensions - it's already built atop a browser.