text-first design

 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

 * like

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:
 * https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news

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 undefined 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."