text-first design
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Text-first design refers to the practice of designing information and UIs so they are readable/usable/actionable at least as basic plain text. It is also a form of progressive enhancement for content and interaction, first created as plain text, adding increasing amounts of non-text content such as hyperlinks or images, then layout and other styling.
Examples
News Sites
Both CNN and NPR have entire text-only sites with text-only articles etc. that load and render very quickly. More examples that are text-centric:
Pre-web examples
Pre-web examples of plain text publishing are a useful source of empirical examples of explicit formatting using only plain text.
LOD
http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/LOD/
Much/most of this was written pre-web (1987-1993), lots of formatting conventions in the examples therein. LOD was constructed by various authors; apparently each author had their own formatting styles. For example:
---------- Test Sets ----------
Test Sets ----------
Test Sets ======
can all mean something we'd now refer to as H2; therefore it offers a wide choice of readable text formatting.
ZIGZAG
I am including this one not for it's subject matter, but rather as an example of block-quotes and paragraph styling that was common back in the day of 80 column displays and Courier-only printers...
http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/ZIGZAG/
Quotes with attribution:
"Dialectics is the soul of Marxism." [Stalin, _Problems of Leninism_, 1940]
Paragraphs
On CNN (11:30 a.m., EDT, Apr.13, 1993), former Stanford Univ. English professor, H. Bruce Franklin, discussed the recent controversy over the Soviet document on U.S. Vietname POWS.
Posts
Posts about text first design:
- 2014-12-27
Tantek Çelik http://tantek.com/2014/361/t8/text-first-design-universal-listenable-accessible text first design is a form of universal design: listenable, more accessible. also a path to progressive enhancement.