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Readable doesn't really want to be "better" than Readability. In all, they're actually very different beasts. And I honestly don't consider Readability to be m
by tastefulwords 15y ago
Readable doesn't really want to be "better" than Readability. In all, they're actually very different beasts.
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.
- shiven 15y agoThank you for the clarification, I was unaware of the details you just mentioned. 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! [1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1974963 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1974963
- tastefulwords 15y agoYou're very welcome. 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.
- bramstein 15y agoAuthor of the JS implementation here. Let me know if you have any questions about the implementation or problems integrating it. I was hoping someone would pick it up and integrate it with Readability-like service. (I've slowly been working to add support for it to Treesaver http://www.treesaverjs.com/. http://www.treesaverjs.com/.) For hyphenation you might also want to check out my Hypher project (https://github.com/bramstein/Hypher 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.)
- tastefulwords 15y agoThanks for the info, Bram. I'll be sure to hit you up if/when I have any questions.