The beauty of a text only webpage

Summary

The beauty of a text only webpage 2025-08-15 There's something I love about opening a text-only webpage. They're a refuge from the GDPR cookie banners, the trashy ads, the email opt-ins, and the god-forsaken auto-play video. A text-only webpage is clean. It's readable. It's fast and it's simple. The page is just made of text, so it's infinitely reproducible. You can paste the whole thing into an email to a friend. You can put it in ChatGPT to ask questions. Hell—you can post the whole thing on X and pretend you wrote it! You can read it right there, or you can send it to Kindle, save it to Matter, or print it on real-life paper. It's going to work everywhere because it's just text. If you click on a link, it loads lightning fast. It doesn't need a CDN or to pre-load on hover. Hosting text is so cheap it often doesn't have to be monetized. The entire website could be running off a Raspberry Pi. When you're reading, you can skim if you're bored, and then slow down to a crawl when you want to savor the words. You never ever come out of a haze, guilty after reading text for hours. So thank you to everybody who writes and publishes text-only webpages. You've probably lost some engagement by keeping things so clean, but you're contributing to a simple, calm, and happier internet. And I love it.