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I like it, but it's also a bit confusing. I use a read it later service (Instapaper) to read articles from everywhere and interactive ones like this tend to break it.

That in itself is okay, it's just that you don't realize it's broken unless you open the full article and look for interactive bits.

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I understand what you are getting at, but it's really a problem with Instapaper. We shouldn't really expect NYTimes to not exploit the full power of web technologies simply because read-it-later services may not present them in the same way. The readers have to adapt to the content, and not the other way around.

To some degree, yes, but then it's also a problem at Pocket, Evernote, Readability, ReadKit, Safari Reading List, ...

If the content breaks all of their parsers and scrapers because it's tied up in these custom dynamic components, then I wouldn't really expect all of the parsers to handle that themselves. (Of course one pure text standard would be nice.)

The bigger issue to me is that the omissions are silent.

I think what we need is a standard packaging format that will allow services to download interactive articles and all their dependencies easily. Then they can just render it in a web view.

> interactive [articles] like this tend to break [Instapaper].

I would argue it is squarely the other way around.

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