Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.
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A small collection of text-only websites

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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 gatekeepers. People can try new concepts and, if enough people join in, it becomes normal. I'm not saying the plain-text is the best web experience. But it is an experience. Perfect if you like your browsing fast, simple, and readable. There are no cookie banners, pop-ups, permission prompts, autoplaying videos, or garish colour schemes.

I'm certainly not the first person to do this, so I thought it might be fun to gather a list of websites which you browse in text-only mode. If you know of any more - including your own site - please drop a comment in the box!

If you'd like to add a site, please get in touch. The rules are simple - content which has the MIME type of text/plain. No HTML, no multimedia, no RTF, no XML, no ANSI colour escape sequences.

Emoji are fine though; emoji are cool.

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19 thoughts on “A small collection of text-only websites”

  2. I have a bit of a tangential question.

    When I view this post in my newsreader, I see an image of a cat, but when I follow the link to view the entry on your website, I see no cat. Where is he or she hiding?

    Reply

  6. If Markdown (text/markdown) mimetype is allowed, my website is offered in XHTML and Markdown - just substitute the .xhtml in the URLs with .md and get the “source code” view - aligned to 80 character width on a best-effort basis because this is actually how I type in the content for my site 🙂

    I used to use an own plain text data format which was “nicer” to read in the plain text source code (https://masysma.net/32/d5man_legacy.xhtml) but it was too difficult to maintain hence I switched to a Markdown variant understood by pandoc...

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  8. Ah neat, thanks for listing my Website!

    To clarify for my PIM https://fabien.benetou.fr the engine behind it is PmWiki. It means all PmWiki instances that do not block this action (and I bet it's most) can be browsed this way. I took the occasion to add mine to https://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/PmWikiUsers where you can find a lot more.

    So on "a webpage without links is like a fish without a bicycle" and the numerous HN comments on the topic, that highlights that's hypertext is broader than the Web. It is in fact initially text itself linking to more text. One could in terminal curl any of those Websites, parse the specific format for internal links (e.g. [[Group/Page|name]] on PmWiki syntax) then transform to a URL proper. For my own instance it'd be curl https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SwappingPartsOfTheRestrictionStack?action=source | sed "s/\[\[/[[https:\/\/fabien.benetou.fr\//g" | sed "s/]]/?action=source]]/g" and I can then click on URLs via Konsole. I could imagine then forcing it to open again via Konsole (rather than my default browser) and browse the entire... oh well, I'm now re-creating a (extremely minimalist) browser 😉

    FWIW I do believe it's quite beautiful to attempt at being genuinely responsive, namely going "crazy" with e.g. WebXR or datavizs per page (e.g. your Interactive Relationship Graph, I also have something similar using embedded Observable notebook with D3) but also "just" normal 2D non interactive Web all the way to plain text. The audience should be able to browse the way they prefer.

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  10. Terence Eden’s maintaining a list of websites that are presented as, or are wholly or partially available via, plain text. Obviously my own text/plain blog is among them, and is as far as I’m aware the only one to be entirely presented as text/plain.

    Reply | Reply to original comment on danq.me

  17. Elle announced that she'd created a text-based version of her website; right now it only works via curl but you can access it via e.g. curl elle.sh or curl elle.sh/blog. But it certainly delivers all content via text/plain (so long as your User-Agent is set to something it recognises as a plain-text-preferring user agent!).

    Neither she nor I know whether you think that counts, but I feel like it should (it's certainly more a "text-based website" than one which merely allows some content to be transformed into plain text, IMHO). She's happy for it to be added to the list if you agree!

    Reply

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