BBC Betsie: Perl program to create an automatic text-only website version (1999)
I posted this as I think it’s fun to look back at how some “early” web stuff was done and a bit of a trip down memory lane on a Saturday morning.<p>When I was experimenting making websites as a teenager 20 (ouch!) years ago I would love to investigate how other sites worked. The BBC had this little “Text Only” link on all pages of the site that redirected to a version stripped of all images and tables (tables were used for layout, much like HN) with high contrast and large text for the visually impaired and screen readers. Brilliantly ahead of its time thinking about accessibility, which I suppose is the BBCs mandate.<p>The url to these pages were prefixed with something like &#x2F;cgi-bin&#x2F;betsie.pl?url= and the bottom of the pages liked to this page I have submitted (sadly now only in the Internet Archive), it’s affectively a proxy written in Perl that transforms each page on the fly. I remember setting Betsie up on my own site, which no one visited because who would visit the site of a 14yo.<p>I believe Betsy was still in use till about 2010. You can read more about it here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;bbcinternet&#x2F;2012&#x2F;02&#x2F;accessibility_betsie_text.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;bbcinternet&#x2F;2012&#x2F;02&#x2F;accessibilit...</a><p>Source code:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20000824120750&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;education&#x2F;betsie&#x2F;parser.pl.txt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20000824120750&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co...</a>