Readable: A more readable version of "readability"
readable.tastefulwords.com
readable.tastefulwords.com
Erm... Why? Correct me if I'm wrong, but Creative Commons wasn't made for code. There are plenty (even too many) open source licenses to choose from. Why not one of those?
EDIT: Yup, using cc for source code is not recommended: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Com...
Some of them are often confused about open source licenses. It probably doesn't help that there's such heated debate (GPL vs. BSD, for example) amongst the licenses.
In case anyone is interested in using the source code right this second, just come back to the site tomorrow and you'll find the new license explicitly stated.
If you have any cool ideas for what to do with the code, let me know -- I like hearing cool ideas.
Almost all of the 'open source'-type licenses out there concern themselves solely with distribution, not with use. When people find the CC non-commercial, it makes sense to them. Perhaps there needs to be a good 'open source' license created that also includes some use restrictions for these types of cases?
Especially if you (the one licensing your work) are not including a definition of commercial use. Since the license does not include a definition (unless things have radically changed lately) of commercial use, your interpretation of commercial may differ from those using your work. Which for both parties may cause issues.
If you do include a definition than at least the people using your work should have some clue as what constitutes commercial in your interpretation. However 'translating' this across judicial systems/countries/cultures/social spheres will again most likely lead to issues you probably want to avoid.
In my personal opinion the commercial vs non-commercial clause should never have existed in the first place. Maybe it should be shelved just as the Developing Nations license[1] was shelved.
disclosure: I was part of the Creative Commons Netherlands team which introduced the licenses in The Netherlands. I'm still involved in the CC community albeit less active then I used to be.
As it is, people think it's really cool when there's those stupid 3 font size icons at the top of a page and they can 'resize' the page's fonts between 9, 11 and 13 point fonts (w00t!)
When I was developing Readable, btw, I pretty much thought of it as a better implementation of user-defined styles. The text-parsing and main body text extraction is just my way of getting around the problem of content/presentation.
Back to our issue, though: if, tomorrow, browsers all got good enough at user-css that Readable wouldn't be needed anymore, I would gladly convert it into a one-page tutorial explaining to people how to set up their user-css :)
Thanks for some great work, by the way!
It was -- and still is -- my pleasure.
If someone is interested in creating something similar to readability (e.g with us doing the article extraction for you) or does a need a website article extraction, you can contact me t.britz@trendiction.com.
PS. We have so many other ideas on our own and that's the reason we are not doing it ourselves.
One of my major uses for Readbility was to format articles so that I could print them out for later reading. But a recent change to Readability made it so that (at least under Firefox) the browser print function will not break an article into multiple pages. And that makes it pretty useless for printing.
Whatever the problem is, Readable has it, too. Can something be done about this? (Also, does anyone know what the problem is?)
In any case, improving the readability of the web is a worthy goal. Thanks for your efforts.
Could you provide more details, please? -- URL of an example article, more details on what exactly happens that shouldn't happen.
If you'd like, you can get in touch, to do this (http://readable.tastefulwords.com/about-and-contact/) -- as a matter of fact, it would probably be preferable, as opposed to using HC as a bug reporting forum.
I just tried the top five HN links. All exhibited the problem.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2011/04/16/powers...
http://www.logolounge.com/article.asp?aid=lnPf
http://code.google.com/p/leveldb/
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37525/?p1=A2&a...
http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/2011/05/solar-fire/
For each, I clicked on the link, and then clicked my newly made Readable bookmark, which I had set up using the default settings. Then I went to Firefox's File:Print Preview. I have it set on the default settings (Shrink to Fit, Portrait). For each of the five articles listed above, the result was that only one of the displayed pages had article text on it, and this was not the entire article, since it would not fit on a single page. Sometimes other pages were displayed, sometimes not, but if there were any, then they were blank pages.
I am running Firefox 3.6.16 under Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid). I'm perhaps a bit behind in my patching, but, in any case, this is not a new problem.
What you want to print is only contents of Readable's overlay. To that end, please use the Print link, shown in the menu at the bottom of the overlay -- unfortunately, there is no "Print Preview" available.
The technical explanation for this is that Readable's overlay is actually an IFrame -- and browsers support printing the iframe contents as if the iframe were a window onto itself; but they will print the iframe as an element in the main page, when you're printing that instead.
Well, you're right. "Print" works fine.
Three suggestions for you:
(1) Make the "Print" link easier to get at. Not just 'way down at the bottom of the page. Maybe put one with the "Close" link at the upper-right?
(2) Change the text of the "Close" links. I'm not sure what they should say; but "Close" doesn't really convey the right idea. What it actually does, from the user's POV, is not closing, but rather returning to the original styling.
(3) Maybe figure out how to make Readable work with Firefox's Print Preview. (I realize that FF's behavior isn't your fault, but it would still be nifty if it worked.)
Thanks again for all your work.
As for the work: you are most welcome.
If anyone has any suggestions for improvements, or even feature requests, I'm all ears.
I'm not promising I'll implement them; but I'll definitely listen and consider them carefully.
P.S. jbm, thanks a lot for posting this -- I've tried posting Readable to HC myself (twice), but it didn't stick.
It would be even better if you could bookmark your place in a long document and return to it later...
The first one I was actually doing before Readability -- the old version of Readable did it (and Readability wasn't), but I haven't yet reimplemented the feature in the new version.
blockquote, q {
quotes: "" "";
}
blockquote::before, blockquote::after, q::before, q::after {
content: "";
}
If this wasn't intentional, you should really pay attention to what your CSS reset does and make sure to explicitly define everything it resets.
As for the intentionality of that CSS rule: it was intentional -- but some time ago; when quotes were redefined in another part of the CSS.
Blockquotes are included because some browsers quote the content of that element too; don't ask which browsers though, as I honestly don't remember -- but older versions of one browser or another definitely did this.
Note: readability only of late thought to start displaying URL at end of articles.
EDITs:
1) Meant to say I'm pleased to see you working on more flexible/powerful version than Readability (don't much like their latest approach of redirecting during reformatting).
2) You might want to try this sort of test-case - for which Readable only presents the first paragraph: http://boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/05/08/seni...
As for your issues on printing: thank you.
I had honestly not given printing very much thought -- as I don't really use it myself.
Your ideas make a lot of sense, though; so count on seeing them implemented.
I like the way your mind works - and so look forward to following your work.
[1] Screen shot of scroll marker in action: http://my.opera.com/Tamil/albums/showpic.dml?album=210985...
(Justification and hyphenation were the two features I always wanted Readability to have, and it always seemed odd to me that something branded "readability" lacked them...)
In the FAQ you answer to whether Readable is open-source: "no" in the sense that the source isn't on display somewhere. Not to split hairs here, but that sentence is incredibly confusing; what does having your code "on display" have to do with being open-source?
So hang tight: more cool stuff is coming -- I just have to find more hours in the day.
I look at it as the long tail of text formatting preferences; and I think it's everyone's right to have text look exactly the way they want -- no compromises. That's why Readable is so incredibly customizable.
So don't worry: justification is optional; and hyphenation will be too.
> Justification might make text look nice.
And that's bad? You have to look at text to read it; I'd rather it look "nice" and as non-distracting as possible. Perhaps "readability" is subjective, but I think text that flows evenly is easy on the eyes.
If you're interested in the code, though, you can find the bulk of it here: http://readable-static.tastefulwords.com/_r/bulk.js
And, yes, it is open source; currently under a variation of the Creative Commons License; but, as detailed further up in this thread, that'll probably change by tomorrow -- as, apparently, Creative Commons isn't recommended for source code.
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jggheggpdocamneaac...
Most likely, Readable will never have multi-page support.
The reason for this is Readable's philosophy, and not any technical difficulties that feature may imply.
It is Readable's intention to take whatever is in your browser window right now, and make it better.
But it is not Readable's purview to go beyond that.
Readable tries to act like a browser, in this respect.
Think about it like this: Readable getting subsequent pages in the background would be pretty much equal to web-browsers doing the same thing for all paging, on all websites.
Just because it is technically possible, does not mean it should be done.Here's the old URL/site, which is also more visible with Javascript disabled.
Don't worry: Readable won't ever have advertising -- the most I'm looking for is something like a very small "Sponsored By XXX" banner, at the bottom -- if any cool company will ever be interested that is.
The new site will be redesigned -- and it will be a lot better when JavaScript is turned off. But I really don't recommend you use the old site any more, as that still runs the old version of the application -- which is way worse, in terms of performance.
I hope you're still using Readable, and that it's still helping you read the web more comfortably.
http://readable.tastefulwords.com/faq/
Still, not 100% sure if the URL is considered text too and is not sent anywhere.
URLs are tracked, though -- they would be tracked in my server logs, even if I didn't do anything specific to track them.
But they are intentionally tracked -- and a percentage of them are run through an automated Readable test, every day, so that I can see, on average, how often Readable gets things wrong.
However, you'll just have to take my word for it that I won't be reading the server logs -- which contain the same, if not more, data.
You really should be using version control. If you want people to contribute to this open-source project, you can't beat a public repository (like github) at which you can receive patches from other developers. Right now, it is not apparent how I can work to improve your project.
I am using version control; just not public version control.
If you want to help, get in touch (http://readable.tastefulwords.com/about-and-contact/). I'm happy to hear any ideas; and, if you want to do some actual work, that would be quite awesome too.
http://www.filterjoe.com/2011/04/11/web-page-reformatting-se...
Hightlights:
The new Readability takes 6-12 seconds to reformat a page, vs. less than 2 seconds for both the new readable and the old Readability.
New Readability has more features, including Instapaper-like sharing for those who pay.
It is possible to use the old Readability, for those who prefer it.
Count on seeing it in a future release.
The commercialized readability was a step back from the bookmarklet, but this firefox extension seems to work as well if not better. Could someone more experienced please explain this to an ignoramus ...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/readability/
And I honestly don't consider Readability to be my competition. Readable first started because of my own desire to have text formatted a certain way, no matter what website that text happened to be on.
Unfortunately, Readability beat me to the launch by 2 weeks -- otherwise you would all now be talking about Readability as a version of Readable :)
The only reason I didn't kill Readable after that, was that it was different enough from Readability to diverse it's own shot -- plus, I love working on Readable's text-parsing algorithm; it's a very cool problem to solve.
P.S. The extension you pointed to is based on the first Readability bookmarklet -- and it's made by a guy who also made an extension based on the first version of Readable.
Talking of algorithms, does Readable use something like the Knuth and Plass line break algo used by LaTeX? A Javascript implementation was mentioned a while ago on HN[1].
Good luck with Readable, anything that helps reduce clutter (in any part of life) is a great gift. Thanks for sharing!
No; Readable doesn't use anything like the Knuth and Plass algorithm.
But I did thoroughly check out the JS implementation you mentioned; and Readable will probably use a part of the Knuth algorithm in the future -- as I am planning to support hanging quotation marks, hyphenation, as well as better (typographic) justification.
For hyphenation you might also want to check out my Hypher project (https://github.com/bramstein/Hypher) which is a minimal hyphenation engine written in JavaScript. In my benchmarks it is about 4 times faster than Hyphenator.js (and a lot smaller.)
I am complaining the new direction that Readability take since day 1 when they decided to first abandon old readability, than force a meaningless frame around content with a very slow implementation.
My only critique for all: please have a name something other than contains "read".
In the near future, a native solution will be available -- i.e. I'm working on a thin extension, for all browsers, that will act as Readable's launcher (with benefits like keyboard shortcuts, an icon, and slightly faster load times).
Also, I think they need to update the default font families because calibri and other post Vista fonts are as commonly used as Arial & co.
Here's a bug report for you. Using Win7,32bit/Opera 11.10, the text field for specifying custom font families doesn't really show because the borders aren't visible. Screenshot http://i.imgur.com/gwb2O.jpg
If the theme is awesome, I'll add it to Readable's selection of themes (http://readable.tastefulwords.com/?setup#explain-style-theme...). Did you try those out, by the way?
If you know CSS, you can also heavily customize Readable via the "More CSS" option.
I like it though, keep it up. :-)