Plain Text Sports (opens in new tab)

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.

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 +------+.

I did a `curl https://plaintextsports.com/mls/standings` and, to my surprise, got an HTML response back (rather than just plaintext data).

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.

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.

https://github.com/paaatrick/playball

I like it!

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.

I like plain text. But this site is not plain text. It is HTML and css.

  <head><meta name="referrer" content="origin"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="news.css?QZejSKY7mNWXnObVdaSN">
        <link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico">
        <title>Submissions from plaintextsports.com | Hacker News</title></head>

Where do you get your data from? I've found sports data (especially odds/lines) to be overly expensive when trying to build hobby apps.

Hey, HN! Creator here!

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.

[1]: Original Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310314

[2]: ASCII football field: https://twitter.com/CodeIsTheEnd/status/1436003783327293452

[3]: Atrioc, Nvidia marketing streamer: https://twitch.tv/atrioc

[4]: Never Miss Moment Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t1qY0vOJWc

[5]: Bucks Championship Run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WHcP4PTBHY

[6]: Wisconsin Sports Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLsm0MirOEg

[7]: jless, a command-line JSON viewer: https://jless.io

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.

[1] https://yle.fi/aihe/tekstitv

[2] https://www.mtvtekstikanava.fi/new2008/100-01.htm

This feels very much like teletekst, which is arguably the best thing on TV worldwide.

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!!

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.

This rules -- but needs to actually be plain text.

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. :)

It should output with curl in plaintext as easy as https://wttr.in/

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?

Should be called Plain Text American Sports, but fair effort nonetheless

I was wondering what kind of sports could be played through plain text.

See also http://www.ismytrainfucked.com/ for NYC subway updates.

My only complaint is that I'd love NCAA boxscores like the pros, but otherwise, I love it!

Always liked these for having in a terminal window at jobs that didn't allow websites like ESPN.com

Always wished for one with play-by-play

It'd be fun to have a sms subscription to a particular league's schedule, a team's activities, or a single game.

Doesn't look good on actual plain text browsers such as lynx or links2, but still works, sorta...

I thought this was going to be esports for Zork or Rogue.

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.