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…
It seems plaintext blogs are a weird child of smallweb design.
I think it would be best to have some kind of markup to identify links, and provide other things like italics, bold, subscript, superscript. For example, as in gemini protocol.
You’d think somebody would already have invented some sort of HyperText Markup Language. Oh well.
I guess the point of using only text is to test how far you can go with performance. Using plaintext, or a simple markup language, also forces you to not do the things you can do with HTML.
Image a news website where the focus is the actual news, instead of the weirdly sized max-contrast cookie banner, or the weird space left for ads that do not load because of uBO.
That sounds a lot like RSS.
I’d guess more like gopher