This does look really nice, and the author should be proud, however I wanted to make a general comment (which isn't a critism of this website).
If you aim is to help people who want pure text-based interfaces (the blind in particular), this is much worse than a proper HTML page, which they can easily explore by headers. Well-formed HTML is actually one of the most accessible formats, and drawing boxes with CSS (rather than ASCII art) is also much better, as a screen reader would try to read the art, and get confused by boxes next to each other.
To add – the two aren't mutually exclusive. You can have page layouts with divs and correct tags that screen readers can understand AND draw ascii borders around it.
Yep exactly, heck you could just link in tui.css and go wild making something that looks like text but is 100% accessible with ARIA labels and semantic markup: https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss
Why are we assigning motives to creations where none is stated? ASCII art loads fast and the miniscule stylesheet and script barely slows anything down.
Plenty of people who aren't disabled like minimalist interfaces, because minimalist interfaces tend to stay relatively static.
Plus, in this case, the main utility seems to be that there's a single place you can check the results of any mainstream sports event, rather than going through the million hoops to get search engines to give you a page where you can find results.
This site is HTML, replacing <div> with <table> wouldn't change that. Tabular data can still be plain text. It's just rendered in tables instead of divs and spans.
Plain text is good because it
1. Loads fast
2. Can be parsed easily
<table>s load just as fast, and can be parsed much faster by humans and computers alike.
Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it correctly. This is all costs of markup without any benefit. Bring accessibility in the mix (which we should always do) and it's a non-starter.
Personally, I love the site, and I'm glad it is the way it is: It looks and feels better than any plausible alternative. It sure seems like it has all of the benefits and only one of the drawbacks (vaguely inaccessible).
A person can just make something for their own enjoyment. It's not the end of the world.
This isn't "plain text." It's still laid out via HTML (and CSS). HTML tables somehow get a bad rap, but they are perfect for tabular data, which most of this data displayed on this particular site is. A proper "plain text" interface in HTML would be the data wrapped in a PRE tag, right?
To be clear, regardless of the HTML layout, I do like this site, because I can quickly and easily check NHL scores and standings without the cruft that comes from most sporting websites.
> HTML tables somehow get a bad rap, but they are perfect for tabular data, which most of this data displayed on this particular site is.
For me, not supporting some kind of sorting natively makes them not perfect. It's really important for me when reading tabular data to have that option.
As someone with friends who use screen readers, I notice when sites are close, but not quite there. Many websites are just a lost cause, but this is very close to very accessible :)
The main limitation is it would be nice if the sections were labelled, either with a <hx>, or <section>, to make it easier to jump around the page.
The ascii art gets read, which is a bit annoying, aria-hidden="true" will make the ascii art not get read out as text.
The best option is to try out with a screen reader -- on both windows + mac a decent screen reader is built in (it's worth best with the default browser, safari on mac, edge on windows). I'm not expert on screen reading on Linux.
This is something that frustrates me: it's actually really hard to design for screenreaders because it's hard to actually check the results in a free/volunteer context. So you often just have to just hope you're being "semantic" enough.
And I did try to use Orca but I just could not get it to work, the TTS service was sulkily disinclined to accept any requests.
Nowadays it's really easy to check on mac + windows, as the built in stuff is "good enough", particularly if you use the OSes default browser (Safari and edge respectively).
I believe vision-impaired users would greatly prefer their own TTS, in part because many can listen at 5-10x speed since they're so used to hearing that particular voice.
It sounds as though the author has not actually asked vision-impaired users.
And of course audio is not only for vision-impaired users.
I can play audio directly from a webpage at 5-10x speed easily, but I use the command line programs like ffmpeg/mplayer/mpv/vlc, not a browser like Chrome.
Assuming a Google employee's belief reflects what all web users actually prefer (doubtful!), websites could offer a variety of audio with the same TTS voices that screen readers use.
By including the audio file, which only includes the readable text, one can avoid the problem of screen readers trying to read ASCII art, decorative elements, etc.
Some news websites, for example Bloomberg, have been including audio files for years. Wikipedia also offers audio files created with TTS.
Does it really need to override my font size? 13px is too small for my display. Of course removing the override breaks it because it has a max-width set in px. But why does it have a max-width? It is important not to have long lines of text but there are no long lines on this page, each box has it's own size. So by removing font-size and max-width rules this is far more readable for me. And while I'm at it don't force Courier, not a great font, just use monospace and get the user's default monospace font.
But I find this quite funny, while it is obviously going for a plain-text appearance it actually uses javascript and a lot of "complex" CSS like flexbox making it actually scale nicely to different size screens once the max-width is removed. But if the implementation is actually using these complex features why target a plain-text look? Maybe it is a personal preference but for me simple line borders are a lot less noisy and distracting than +------+.
> Does it really need to override my font size? 13px is too small for my display
The advent of good browser-based zooming has made non-default font-size users like yourself a small segment. The days of having to author everything in em/rem is mostly over – keeping everything scalable was tedious and prone to issues.
I'd bet you encounter issues regularly: explicit font sizes on a root element are a ubiquitous practice. Examples include HN itself, Google, MDN, Apple, etc.
That being said, 13px is quite small. I'd encourage at least a 16px minimum. But for now, simply zoom in with Cmd/Ctrl-+
I'm sure I have "problems" quite often but the sites listed are quite readable. Sure, I would prefer them to use my default font size but something with their contrast, font or otherwise seems to make it not stand out.
> non-default font-size users like yourself
What does this even mean? The default font is being overridden and irreverent here. Are you suggesting that there is a default default font that is expected to be used across all browsers?
> Are you suggesting that there is a default default font
Yes, the `font-size` value when you freshly install the browser: 16px. This changeable value had a lot of historical importance, as it was the only way users could scale sites up.
Good Samaritan CSS authors had to write not only all font-sizes in percentages or em's to respect that value (rem came later) but also think about things like min/max-widths, padding/margin, breakpoints, etc. Folks would later use pixel-to-em converter functions in early tools like Bourbon and Compass. You can still find old polemics on authoring explicit pixel values from folks like Jakob Nielsen[0].
These days, Cmd-+ in browsers zooms instead of scales font-size, and things just work out nicely: padding and margins magically grow, breakpoints trigger as expected, etc. As a result, direct font-size adjustments have gone from living in the taskbar in IE4 to being buried in Google Chrome in Preferences > Appearance > Font Size.
In my opinion, it's for the best. Users aren't left out in the cold by nonconforming CSS, and CSS devs don't have to do battle with scalable values.
I think the suggestion is that instead of using your computer with a font size that is comfortable to read, you should leave all the rest of the fonts on your system tiny, but zoom in your browser so that web pages are readable.
> Are you suggesting that there is a default default font that is expected to be used across all browsers?
Yes – 16px times new roman.
Almost everything overrides the default font size because almost every browser has a default of 16px, while almost every desktop OS uses a UI font of <13px.
It does if you have a huge screen or feel that all sites' fonts are too small, right? Anyway, every browser I use also persists zoom settings chosen for each site.
On mobile devices as well? Genuinely asking. I keep a battery of custom CSS files for every site I visit just to keep the text settings in sync across OSes, browsers and devices. HN's CSS for example is...quaint I guess but incredibly antiquated.
Here are my settings on Safari iOS, which get added as you change font sizes across sites: https://i.imgur.com/w2lJev4.png. You can see that I clearly agree with you regarding HN :)
Seems like this isn't actually plaintext (as in the mimetype `text/plain`), but is instead just "minimalist-aesthetic sports" (with the caveat that for some reason there's CSS styling to make the font unreadably small at 2560x1440, which was what led me to try `curl` in the first place, assuming that since it'd be plaintext, I could just get the data in plaintext without any extra CSS formatting making it hard to read).
As a Swede, seeing Americans react to this website is interesting. Sweden introduced "Text-TV" in 1979 (it was pioneered by the BBC in the early 70's I believe), which means that reading text based sports results on your TV is a completely ubiquitous cultural phenomenon for anyone who grew up in Sweden in the 80's, the 90's and all the way up to when the Internet and smartphones took over.
Swedish state television (SVT) still provide "Text-TV" online at https://www.svt.se/text-tv -- many Swedes including myself still know some of the numbers by heart, 100 being the index and 377 being the favorite page of dads all over the country (live sports results).
I vividly remember being a kid (before DSL broadband or even dial-up was a thing in my life) flipping through the pages and guessing numbers between 100 and 999 to see where I would end up, long before I would end up doing the same thing on the early Internet.
SVT's "Text-TV" is to my knowledge still the worlds oldest, operational service of its kind.
> SVT's "Text-TV" is to my knowledge still the worlds oldest, operational service of its kind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_teletext_services says “The Netherlands has run a regular Teletext service since the end of 1977 on the public broadcasting channels”. That would make that older. Ceefax was from 1974, so it seems there’s room for an even older still operating one.
Ceefax was shut down in 2012.[1] I have no idea about the Dutch one, it's possible that it's older.
edit: According to this site[2] the Dutch teletext was broadcast "on the open network" on April 1, 1980. There's also a Swedish source claiming that Swedish Text-TV is the oldest in the world.[3]
Same here in Germany, where regular operation of Teletext (or called "Videotext" here) started in 1979[1] and is still a thing. Surprisingly, I experience deaf people in my sphere using it. Of course, all the information is available on websites as well, but the strict form and reduced text amount per information in Teletext seem to make it very accessible for those who struggle with complexity of written language.
I think a common use case for this type of technology was subtitles for deaf people, so it's possible that they still use it out of habit. These days I think subtitles are probably sent to most TVs in a more modern fashion.
This is great! I wonder what needs to happen in order to get `curl plaintextsports.com` to Just Work, similar to `curl wttr.in`.
EDIT: After inspecting the HTML, I think Plain Text Sports is a bit of a misnomer. With that name, I might have expected a lot of <pre> tags in the markup, but there are no none to be found. Instead, CSS is used for the layout, even line breaks. So, Hypertext Sports?
Beautiful. I love it! Dark mode is beautiful. So very well done. This went right to the top of my bookmark list.
Only constructive feedback would be if it can better fill a normal 16:9 desktop monitor - it looks optimized for mobile, which is great - but it's too small and narrow for keeping open on the PC
If you like MLB - this reminds me of Playball which runs in the terminal.
Sites like NHL.com or ESPN.com are borderline hostile navigating this info.
It is reminiscent of the morning sports pages in the newspaper I would read each morning as a kid.
The one improvement would be if there was page that summarized the league. i.e. Click on NHL and it lists scores, games that day, standings, and possibly scoring leaders. That would be capture all of the important points on one clean page, as the newspaper used to.
Great site, I've been using it for months. It's a really different and richer experience at night when the games are in progress. There are added features for the big leagues, such as the NBA games feature a game flow graph of the scoring margin. It truly shines when you're at a sold out NBA game, you can barely get a tweet out due to the crowd size, but you can still refresh the box score of your own game in <second to check on foul trouble.
That is very neat, and great use of a low bandwidth style site. On the other hand at the NBA games I’ve been to they have the box score on the jumbotron.
true, but usually only for players currently on the court and who knows what direction you'll have to rubberneck to read it. This is one instance where I like mixing the small mobile screen w my real world view, it's an augmented reality!
I've made CBS Sports my go to for scores. It loads quickly (for me at least), it's easy to read. They provide betting lines right up until game start (if you are into that) and even tell you what network is broadcasting the game, including competitors.
ESPN has a surprisingly comprehensive JSON API that isn't locked down. If you're only using it for a hobby app, you won't run into any issues. It's been around for quite a while.
It's a "private" API for their website, but like I said it's been around for a while and using it in a hobby app isn't going to be an issue. Using it commercially is just begging for trouble, though.
As someone who maxed out multiple credit cards trying to pay for sports data, I know this pain all too well. If you're working on a hobby app, we give sports data away for free.
I started building Plain Text Sports last year when I was watching an NFL playoff game in rural southwest Wisconsin. We had poor TV reception -- the image was going in-and-out -- and the local radio station was mostly static. I tried to check ESPN, but the loading bar was as frozen as the ground outside. I then had the idea for a website designed for the pure sports fan: no ads, no images, just scores, play-by-play and stats, with a simple information-dense display.
I initially added support for the NBA so I could follow my beloved Milwaukee Bucks. I posted it to /r/nba, got over 600 upvotes in a few hours, and got perma-banned for self-promotion. (I did a Show HN too, but it didn't take off. [1]) Over the following months I added NHL, MLB, NFL, college basketball and football, and added standings and team schedules so it could really be a one-stop-shop for my sporting needs. Just this past month I added MLS and NWSL (National Women's Soccer League). I plan on adding the WNBA and the Premier League later this year too.
Obviously I designed the site with minimalism and efficiency in mind, as a reaction to the bloated web we see today. We don't need heaps of JavaScript just to display a bit of text, nor do we need half-a-dozen sites tracking our "engagement", and our "retention". People just want to get the information they're looking for, as fast as possible. Technology shouldn't get in the way.
Despite the austere presentation, I'm really proud of the design of the site. As a commenter noted, it's not actually plain text, but does use some CSS and a tiny bit of JavaScript (sue me!). But there are a lot of small details that I put a lot of effort into: the game times on the front page automatically show up in your local time zone, and the boxes automatically expand to fit long time-zones. For the NBA, the raw play-by-play data I get is very granular. A steal, for example, is both a turnover by the offensive player, and a steal for the defensive player, but I combine those into a single event in the timeline. For the NFL, I draw an ASCII drawing of the field showing the progress of the most recent play [2]. When a team wins a championship, they get an ASCII trophy and a dedicated spot on the front-page for the next week. It's been really fun trying to figure out how to pack as much information as possible into a 45 column-wide display.
A streamer I watch on Twitch [3] who does marketing at Nvidia also had a competition amongst his viewers to make their own ads, and that led me down another rabbit hole of fun "plain-text" videos. [4][5][6].
Plain Text Sports also led to my next project. I get a lot of data from publicly accessible, but undocumented JSON APIs, and it was frustrating digging through giant JSON files trying to understand how certain situations were represented. That led me to build jless [7], a command-line JSON viewer, which made it to the front page last month.
Question: why not use a proportional font for all things other than the score? It would make readability much better. Is the output being mapped to individual character widths, that's why?
Also, Nanum Gothic Coding has a fantastic monospace font that is highly readable. Might be worthwhile for you to consider using this free font since it will greatly increase readability.
It also has the added benefit that the "+" and the "---" align (I only mention this because I noticed the system monospace font on macOS does not align at the box score border "+----")
Very cool, thanks for making this! I'm curious if you have any plans to monetize the site, or at least cover your costs? I know the live sports data feeds are not that cheap!
Thanks for your work. I've been using your site for a while. Amazing how in 2022, with 4G widely available, it's that difficult to check a game score every five minutes while you're working. It feels as if sites like ESPN optimize their sites to minimize the probability that they are useful.
This made me remember that quite a lot of people in some countries still use teletext for sports cores. Similar to this site, it's fast, simple and very much low-def. In Finland (where teletext was big back in the day), you can still access web versions of the main TV channels' teletext services [1][2]. Not sure about other countries.
Even if you don't follow sports that much (like me), it's also a great way to browse news in general – without any clutter or clickbait, as the technology is so restricted. I've noticed it's so much easier to avoid doomscrolling traps compared to regular websites, especially during the latest global horrors.
Spaniard here. My dad still uses teletext for that, even though he is more or less capable with a computer. He loves just typing the page numbers and watching the scores updated in almost realtime.
I hate using google but the experience of getting MLB scores and game status from google is so much better than actual MLB websites. I would totally use this instead!!
Also one of the few things that Siri seems to be good at.
As long as you are only interested in certain very large sports teams. (She has no idea there are any minor league baseball teams.)
But at least if you ask for a score and the game hasn't started yet, she's smart enough to tell you the time it starts, rather than giving you the scores for yesterday's game. Though, maybe she should do both for completeness.
I'd love something like this for European football leagues. The "best" I've found is https://livescore.com but for a while they stopped working on iPhone (they really wanted you to download their app) and I'm quite sure they're probably full of trackers and stuff.
https://m.livesoccertv.com/ took more than 4 MB. And if you navigate to Sunday's results it took 18.2 MB, which I think is too heavy. I wish there was something light weight like HN.
I'd happily throw something together myself by scraping a collection of different sites, but I suspect the "live" part is what could be tough. I don't imagine there's free live scores API floating around. And even BBC's scores are frequently minutes behind. And I don't think this is the kind of thing I can justify spending money on (unless I plastered ads all over it, defeating the original purpose).
Back in 1997 I was studying overseas and we didn't have internet access, but we did have e-mail access over uucp. There was a service back then which would end you a text mode version of a web page (which would probably be much harder today, as users of w3m or links could attest) and we'd have it setup to email us the scores every night.
25 year younger me would have loved this site for that. :)
Noticed NCAA basketball on there -- if anyone trying to keep up with March Madness, this twitter bot is handy for games going down to the wire: https://twitter.com/tothewirebot
I remember back in the earliest days of mobile "internet" (when WAP had a more innocent meaning) there were sites/services like this you could access from a Nokia phone. Due for a comeback?
Sadly, it's https. So a lot of older computers that still live and breathe off of sites like this (see: 68k.news) can't access it due to the bizarre (or Google pressured) security certificate ... for a sports scores site.
That's nonsense and you know it. If you really want to use plain-text web access you can run a local decryption proxy outside of your low-power old computers and use them as if it's 1989.
I actually have no idea what you just said (and you can believe it). But I'll Google "local decryption proxy" and see if that's something feasible I could try with, say, my Powerbook Pismo running macOS 9.2 with no modern browsers. I'm no engineer, so please don't assume everyone here is.
This site is specifically targeted to software engineers, so it's a reasonable assumption that we can talk about the relevant topics without having to simplify things for people outside that group.
For a reverse proxy, you would want a computer capable of the encryption methods the modern web's security standards demand and to install a web server on it which you can access from the older computer. The server computer does not have to be fancy at all. A Raspberry Pi can do it. For software I would recommend either Caddy (https://caddyserver.com/docs/quick-starts/reverse-proxy) or NGINX (https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/web-server/reverse-...). It can be rather complicated and difficult for someone to do, especially if you're not a web programmer.
If both that and upgrading your computer aren't in the cards at the moment, I would think using the recently-discontinued browser Classilla is your best bet: http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ It at least supports some deprecated forms of TLS & SSL. I hear there's a fork called Phoenix that kind of supports TLS 1.2 even.
(I would recommend using the most updated browser regardless.)
If you aim is to help people who want pure text-based interfaces (the blind in particular), this is much worse than a proper HTML page, which they can easily explore by headers. Well-formed HTML is actually one of the most accessible formats, and drawing boxes with CSS (rather than ASCII art) is also much better, as a screen reader would try to read the art, and get confused by boxes next to each other.