Stallman of course.

> I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Using lynx, the only thing that makes reading Hacker News somewhat inconvenient is the lack of indentation to show the nesting hierarchy, but otherwise it works quite well.

Some other sites are so messed up that it's actually more comfortable to read them in a text-only browser that completely ignores CSS and replaces images by their alt-tags.

Of course I frequently do want to look at images, so my main browser remains Firefox, but it's still useful to remember that other browsers with different tradeoffs exist and can be used.

Sometimes, you really just want to read some text and don't need any of that fancy other stuff.

You can see the indentation if you use w3m. HN uses tables to structure the comment hierarchy, and the w3m browser does a pretty great job rendering tables.

It'd be much nicer if HN used nested lists (without icon) for comment structuring. That'd also work fine in many more textmode browsers.

w3m sets the column width for the HN nested table spacer all to one value, so you visually only get two levels on nesting. Here is a screenshot of this thread as rendered by w3m:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/rZ1yOj55fvQqtWWbOnoSTpvCgx...

w3m table rendering is based on a heuristic algorithm and fails in some cases. See the "Table rendering algorithm in w3m" section in:

http://w3m.sourceforge.net/STORY

True! I fixed that issue in the community maintained HN version here, https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/commit/0d6cea75d902899...

Would be nice if HN would fix it, too.

I always browse HN using the links2 browser. No CSS! (Although elinks is pretty interesting, in that it's a text-only browser that implements some CSS.)

Firefox's "reader view" is quite good for that (and to avoid bloggers terrible choice of fonts/font color/font size)

If a website doesn't look like it was made in the last couple of years (think: Medium-like centered content with large fonts), I click that handy reader view button out of a habit.

I can't stand reading articles with <18px font size. Some pages (like HN) I simply zoom in to something like 150%, but if it's just an article, hitting that button is easier to me than zooming in.

Links (a fork of lynx IIRC) does images, it might be off by default, can't recall. Back when I used Slackware it was handy to have a terminal based browser for looking up how to fix things.

A more interesting question would be if it is possible to disable the "dynamic" part of the CSS in any browser. Things like ":hover", ":active" that this proof of concept abuses and leave just the more benign static styling rules.

Perhaps preventing the loading of URLs in the dynamic parts would be enough?

Probably not, you'd also need to disable a lot of other optimizations.

For example, a browser will not load an image if it's set to `display: none` in CSS (at least not right away). That could be abused to then trigger the download when CSS changes without a URL needing to be on the CSS at any point.

Well, I have firefox `layout.css.visited_links_enabled` set to false not to leak history.

Even if that's set to true (the default), doesn't Firefox prevent the page from reading the :visited state of links? I'm not sure what the privacy value of that pref is.

Blind users can’t be seen.

Screen readers interface with normal browsers, so JS and CSS will be loaded as per usual (unless the user has gone to the trouble of turning them off).

Or, at least, disabling `url()` in CSS.

Indeed, that would be enough to stop the dynamic tracking - no need to go full no-CSS.

Does any browser actually allow you to do that?

I'd say only for "content" and @font-face "src" for now.

> Whose going to be first to make the 'I always browse the Web with CSS disabled' post?

Is it time for a gopher[0] revival?

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

Wouldn't something like this be enough?

    ::before, ::after {
        content: '' !important;
    }

You have no idea how many websites you would break:) I've seen UI strings in "before" and "after" pseudoelements...

Don't think it would be a huge loss. Most common use case is for unicode characters to render font icons (i.e. font-awesome).

No, easily defeated. It would start a selector specificity war.

'I always browse the Web with CSS disabled'!!!!111oneoneone /s (is this how it works??)

Doesn't everyone?? ;)