> 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).
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.
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:
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
