+1. I wish every site was designed first like this, then enhanced with CSS, then enhanced with JS. That is called progressive fallback, where CSS/JS is used for the enhancement of content, not the element of the content.
I suspect corporate news orgs don't support text-only versions of their site due to a lack of display ads. I think BBC has one, but every time I go to it on a mobile device, I am redirected to the media-heavy mobile site.
That works excellent for individual pages and articles. But you have to get to them via the information and graphics heavy site, because for extracting the most important navigational components the mobile reader will not work very well.
At least a few years ago, there was still gopher up at NPR. The sysadmin whose personal passion that was left, though; I'm not sure if it was maintained after that.
When you strip away all of the graphics you realize that some news articles are thin on content (only 1 or 2 paragraphs). Maybe the links I looked at were photo galleries. Fun to look through the site and not be distracted.
Keep in mind that it's radio, so a lot of their content is produced as audio first, and transcribed/summarized later, so if you're looking at content from the news magazine show airing now, it might be a bit light. Compare http://thin.npr.org/s.php?sId=409088251&rid=2 from today, which currently (~8pm EDT) stands at one paragraph, to http://thin.npr.org/s.php?sId=408010714&rId=2&x=1 from a few days ago, which is more like 15-ish paragraphs, despite both being of about the same audio duration.
Seeing this really solidifies my advocacy for modern web technologies (including JS & CSS). In no way would I prefer to use this than the main NPR site.
The entire point of CSS was to separate presentation from content. There is no reason why we can't all be happy, except for a misunderstanding of the correct way to use certain tools.
Notice that, no matter how nice a site looks, somebody will be on a weird device or will have some disability which will render the minimalistic version much preferable.
People tend to think these are unusual cases, not worth optimizing for. More cynically, they are not affected by them so they don't care. These people lack imagination. The weird device can be a future device trying to access old content. The disability could be a natural consequence of growing old enough.
I was disappointed; I thought they had a site that had transcripts of all the audio.
Audio and video simply don't work for me; I can read so much faster than I can listen, and I can skip back and forth trivially by moving my eyes, rather than scrubbing.
Still requires a database call for the content and these pages are unlikely to be cached. If I had to guess, NPR isn't using their made collection of servers, probably just a single server.
If you are on a *nix machine you can probably use Links2 to get the best of both worlds, fast loading and rendering of text with embedded graphics. I wonder if anyone has tried porting Links or Links2 to Android?
