Readability
lab.arc90.com
lab.arc90.com
I.e. when I'm ready, and how I like it.
Before —> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4595/hn-readibility-menu.jpg
After —> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4595/hn-readibility-done.jpg
The update is scheduled for release on Monday.
If that sounds useful to you, let me know, I can probably open-source it.
In any case, I was just thinking that I would really like to get a python library that does the readability thing for a personal Google App Engine project I have in mind. If anyone knows of anything, I'd love to save some time. Otherwise, I'll probably start from Beautiful Soup and try porting readability on top.
Your Ruby code might also be useful if you end up open-sourcing it.
Would like to be able to change settings once the page has been loaded though.
Even in the cases where the layout isn't particularly bad the consistency of reading things formatted in a way you're used to makes stuff easier to read.
I have it on my FF bar now... would love the feature to change the style it while looking at the page.. different pages need different reading styles for me.
The thought of being able to use this on an iPad makes me tingly in all the right places.
Most of them are just about readable on my 24" iMac, but on my tiny little netbook, if it wasn't for Readability I'd miss out on them.
Of course, in an ideal world we wouldn't need Readability as much because people would consider small screen sizes and poor eyesight when picking the site design.
There's a lot to be said for clear, large, readable, high-contrast text, either where there's a big block of text, or a critical label used for skimming the layout of the page. If you want your users to be able to quickly find the element on a page that's important to them, give it a big fat text label.
I sometimes give advice to the web editor at a consumer magazine-- their body text is small, tightly spaced, and low contrast. As a result their average time-on-page and bounce rates are quite depressing. Unfortunately, as is the case in many large orgs, making the content (remember, they are in the content business) more accessible to the site's visitors is not necessarily high on the larger organization's priority list (they seem to only be interested in pageviews, thus boosting their ad inventory so they can qualify for larger ad networks).
Question: Don't you know if Readability can be used programmatically? I would like to have a script, which would automatically save a Readabilite'd version of a web page.
As of your question, you can inject <script> tags pointing to Readability into the DOM. If you want to do it without the browser, WebKit is your friend.
There's also a bookmarklet there so you can easily process urls.
1. Don't use it if the page is over SSL (it'll include external JS over HTTP which means that you are vulnerable to MITM)
2. Don't use it if the website carries "sessionid"s over URL
3. Keep in mind that arc90's JS can actually read the cookies (I'm not saying they are but they can). That means if someone hack into their systems they can access to cookies in used websites. (think XSS). Obviously by using it you trust instapaper guys with your account in the active website.
Developers of Readability should point out these security issues clearly in their website.