You can’t put a price on some round-rim glasses wearing EU bureaucrat named Klaus-Dietrich von Regulieren sleeping soundly because of that banner.

While still wasteful, CSS is one of those things you can do astronomically wrong before it starts being noticeable. Case in point here: inlining 560 kb of CSS with the page and just sending it with the entire HTML file each time is only ~61 kb of actual network transfer to load the article (due to brotli encoding).

For me in Firefox it only loads the article's HTML (50-70kb) and the favicon (7kb).

Are you sure it isn't some addon you have?

The point is that it would still work if you block JS, CSS and graphics.

Check it out in lynx for example

Ever tried a TUI browser like lynx?

Which is cool but it's not web, and few people have working TV reception that supports it at the moment. The web version of Teletekst (https://nos.nl/teletekst) is over 3 MB in size.

Oooh... can you imagine if servers actually took the hint and sent only text if the client provided Accept: text/markdown, text/plain headers?

Did load for me.

Closing.

Me neither.

I still use it. RSS is dead, long live RSS.

And Javascript free web...

IMO, we need a RSS optimized browser that would also block Javascript before user interaction (or even more).

Firefox's Reader mode is pretty great. Doesn't reduce network traffic but makes almost any page more readable.

DuckDuckGo has a js-free version of their website at https://html.duckduckgo.com/

It is more to do with the fact that vast majority of people aren't going to bother subscribing to an RSS feed. I am on a freelancer slack group that supposed to have a RSS feed for jobs. The feed is often broken for weeks because most people don't use it.

Even when it isn't broken the display output is broken in Thunderbird because the dev isn't going to bother checking Thunderbird as many people don't use email clients like that anymore and instead use webmail.

I never have used RSS that much as normally if I want to check for new things on a site, I will just go to the site and look myself.

I suppose I meant more of a best practice - if every news site could be found at the subdomain of lite.XYZ.com, or perhaps some way for the browser to request specifically no images or styles, it’d be easier for the end user to find.

RSS is a good point that I didn’t consider. Although it tends to be a summary and hyperlink to the main site.

RSS is just a list of links to webpages, maybe with summaries. The readers generally fetch those webpages and filter out the text, but every browser has equivalent functionality now. You can do it with literally any HTML page, though some websites try to fight it (since depending on the reader, it neuters ads).