YSK because webpages are increasingly bloated from excessive trackers, popups, sidebars, and more. This diminishes the experience of reading, eats up your precious internet data, and threatens your privacy.
Newswaffle is a public service created by Acidus that intelligently strips webpages of their cruft and leaves only the valuable text content. Its based in gemtext and was originally intended to be accessed using the gemini protocol, however it can very easily be reformated to HTML and proxied through HTTP for normal web browser usage. The proxy I am using is SmolNet Portal by Mozz.
If you have a kobo e-ink ereader or similar device with extremely simple web browser its invaluable for getting a modern webpage to render correctly.
Source Code
YSK because the people who made these tools and host them on their own time and dime, may not be around forever. Only a few other people on this planet know these tools exist or actively use them. There are only one public instance of these services running thanks to the makers themselves. Ideally we need some self hosters to deploy and fork these tools to ensure they exist in the future. That can’t happen if nobody knows about them.
Neat to see more tools like this out there.
Great for any retromachines that can’t / won’t run the modern web (and things like Lynx and EWW) and accessibility purposes.
I’ll have to take a look at how it’s parsing the pages. Brow.sh is usually my goto for these use cases, but that’s using a whole Firefox to do the rendering.