They say the Web has become very heavy for a large number of devices, and on the surface that's true… but we should also remember that the main portals have mobile and pure-text versions that don't receive as much promotion. The section Awesome Text Only News by Jo Sprague on GitHub is an excellent starting point, and includes a tool to transform any link into plain text.
Now, at this point someone says: "Lisandro, Reading Mode exists," but I've found isolated examples where it loads incorrectly, or simply doesn't work. Text Mode tends to eliminate any conflict from the root, and if we have to squeeze the most out of a particularly humble device (old tablets, browsers with limited compatibility, etc.), it's our best option. All we need is a source, a starting point to begin exploring those links, and thus we arrive at the section "Awesome Text Only News" organized by Jo Sprague on GitHub.
Text Mode news sites, for all devices
The Text Mode version offered by NPR is one of the best.
What can we find there exactly? If you're interested in what's happening across the pond, NPR, CNN Lite and CBC Lite cover the United States and Canada. The portal Current Events / Actualidad of Wikipedia is another solid alternative, with mobile versions in English and Spanish. There's also room for frontends and aggregators, such as Neuters (which presents a lite version of Reuters) and Skimfeed, but it's necessary to remember that aggregators tend to favor the full editions of articles.
The good news is that "Awesome Text Only News" is not alone in the "Text Mode" adventure. The GreyCoder portal published in November 2023 its own list of minimalist sites, among which stand out the frontend Today's Guardian by Phil Gyford (which presents articles from The Guardian and Observer on Sundays), HackerWeb to view Hacker News links in a different way, and another very interesting aggregator, The Brutalist Report.
No text mode? txtify.it creates it for you...
To finish, it's obvious that Spanish sites are conspicuously absent, but all is not lost: if we return to "Awesome Text Only News", at the bottom we find a link to txtify.it, which converts entire articles to plain text, and when I say "plain text", I mean a "readme.txt" style. In fact, the conversion is so good that it detects italic and bold text, using underscores and uppercase to replace it. Links below!
Awesome Text Only News: Click here
GreyCoder Minimalist Sites: Click here
txtify.it: Click here
