8 ms·

Readability

101 points by KevinBongart 18y ago

tptacek 18y ago
It's slick, but does anyone else see the irony in the fact that they're not only running banner ads on the Readability site itself, but also (subtly) in the sites they're stripping the ads from? It's worth pointing out that, like it or not, we're not really entitled to escape banner advertising.
- pixelmonkey 18y ago
  Most websites with extended articles have links for "Printer-Friendly" pages. Am I violating a moral code by reading the articles in that form? How about when I walk away from my TV when commercials come on? That's what I usually do, when I'm actually watching TV, which is relatively rare. I also never bother reading ads in the newspaper. Sometimes, I fold the newspaper such that I don't have to look at the ad, and can focus on the content. Are you seriously arguing that just because a service chooses to show ads, I'm not entitled to actively ignore those ads?
  - tptacek 18y ago
    I guess the closest you could come to a real "argument" in what I'm saying is: if we adopt technology that hurts the business models of ad-supported sites, we're inviting those sites to develop more intrusive ways of monetizing us.
    - erso 18y ago
      More intrusive? Could you cite examples? There is a business model that would afford the sites that are valuable to users to continue being operational: charging people. If ads can be circumvented, as we know they can, and your site relies on ads, maybe you should charge people outright for your content. If you can't make money by charging people, who cares if your site goes down but you? The value of a site cannot be determined by the operator of it. Only the users determine the value.
      - tptacek 18y ago
        Yes, easily. If browsers all had a big button for stripping ads and rendering pages in a "reader-friendly" style, all the major content sites would break all their stories into 10-page flows with timed interstitial ads.
    - ewiethoff 18y ago
      > if we adopt technology that hurts the business models of ad-supported sites, we're inviting those sites to develop more intrusive ways of monetizing us. So it's an arms race! If I take self-defense classes and install security systems, I invite muggers and robbers to develop more clever ways to monetize me! Yes, I'm speaking hyperbole here. But not really. I do find myself using the word "assault" in my mind when seizure-inducing computer graphics come at me. Likewise, by turning our heads away from our TVs during the ads, we "invite" the advertisers and stations to develop more intrusive ways of grabbing our attention. I think it was the early '90s when I started noticing ads being played at a louder volume. And in the past couple years, one of the stations here in NYC has taken to showing a bright flash between each ad, between each news preview. For the first couple minutes I happened to be facing away from the flashes, I seriously wondered whether a thunder storm was brewing. But no, it was my TV yelling, "Look at me! Look at me! Eyeballs! Eyeballs!"
      - tptacek 18y ago
        Thankfully, the browser vendors are not going to indulge you in this "arms race" fallacy, because most people don't want to antagonize the content providers.
        ewiethoff 18y ago
        Mmm, you're the one who brought the word 'intrusive' into the discussion. I happen to be agreeing with you about increasing intrusiveness. I don't think "arms race" is a fallacy. Instead of advertising, think security for a moment. We all know browser venders are in a perpetual race against phishers and botnets and so on. So when Firefox came along, it billed itself as being "safer" than MSIE. Now think of pop-up ads. The browser vendors do indulge us in an anti-intrusive advertising race when the browsers block pop-up windows by default. My personal techniques against intrusion just happen to be a few steps ahead of Aunt Sally Sue's.
- ewiethoff 18y ago
  > we're not really entitled to escape banner advertising. "Oh, really?" I type into my heavily modded Firefox browser because some computer graphics give me brain seizures. (Too bad I cannot log into HN from my Lynx browser.) Last time I checked, the industry term for a browser is "user agent," and page rendering is under the control of the user agent. I can use whatever user agent I want, and so can you. I can fiddle with my user agent as I see fit, and so can you. That's what your browser's Options dialog is for. Sorry I'm getting really testy here, but I get tired of pointing out to the world that it's the user who is in control, not marketers, not page designers, not Yahoo! CSS Reset...
  - tptacek 18y ago
    The same logic says that I should be able to strip the DRM off a movie I download from iTunes and share it to the world as a torrent; after all, it's my computer, and I'm the user, and I'm the one in control.
    - akkartik 18y ago
      I remember reading about a court ruling that copyright circumvention is different from skipping ads. So you can't pirate the DVD you just bought, but it's ok to fastforward past the previews. Somebody help me out..
    - sci 18y ago
      That's not, imho, a fair comparison - the user agent has the right to alter their perception of the content (strip ads, enlarge font size, have a screen-reader read it) - nowhere in that did the poster suggest that they are then free to re-distribute that content on to other users as your post suggests. I (humbly) put it that your logic is flawed.
      - tptacek 18y ago
        Hm, I think that's right.
        18y ago
- brfox 18y ago
  I think it is more ironic that an article talking about how people like to read things online does not actually explain in words what it is that their tool does - you have to watch a video to get that info.
- imgabe 18y ago
  I disagree. I am certainly entitled to decide what information does or does not get downloaded to my computer.
spydez 18y ago
Interesting note, for those of you uninterested in karma or user names, the bookmarklet will hide both. You'll still have your voting arrows and the comment text; you just won't know what everyone else thought of the comment (aside from their placement relative to each other). It's pretty neat to go on a big thread and hit the bookmarklet. e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501696
sjs382 18y ago
I like this a lot. It's sort of a bookmarklet for people who like to read "Printer Friendly" pages. Unless there's pagination, of course.
- pixelmonkey 18y ago
  You should check out the Firefox add-on "Print Hint": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/700 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/700 It will search a page for a "Printer-Friendly" link and display a glowing green printer icon in the bottom of your Firefox if it finds one. I find that on some pages, this can be a way to quickly navigate to a "Reader-Friendly" page that does support pagination. Of course, sometimes Print Hint doesn't detect a printer link, though I've never had a false positive.
sarvesh 18y ago
Useful but seems buggy. It disabled keyboard input completely in Opera.
kylec 18y ago
It could use more tweaking - I tried to read the latest pg essay with it, but all it would display was the image with the light "PAUL GRAHAM" text at the top of the page. I then tried to go back to the essay, but it looks like the only way to un-Readability the page is to reload it. I then tried to highlight the text that I wanted to read, but Readability doesn't take this into account when generating the page. When you have a service that guesses what the input is supposed to be, there should be a way to gracefully fail and allow the user to manually specify it, and if that doesn't work it should be easy to disable the service.
- ewiethoff 18y ago
  If you're a Firefox user and savvy about CSS selectors, I recommend the Stylish add-on (http://userstyles.org/ http://userstyles.org/). It lets you create blanket tweaks for all sites and specific tweaks for specific sites. And you can turn your tweaks off and on at will. It works even with Javascript turned off. I set colors and fonts and font sizes, adjust column widths, eliminate entire columns, make images semi-transparent so they don't bug me so much, etc.
  - mnemonik 18y ago
    Also, if you're an opera user or have greasemonkey the styles can be loaded as userscripts, which will just use javascript to edit the css style changes you have selected. There are a few styles for Hacker News as well: http://userstyles.org/styles/search/hacker%20news http://userstyles.org/styles/search/hacker%20news
- henryprecheur 18y ago
  Being to select the chunk of text you interested would probably solve this issue. I wonder how Readability "selects" the "relevant" part of the page. Maybe it is just a smart heuristic about what the user want ;) Come from HN => must be a PG fan => Just display "PAUL GRAHAM" => Go back to HN and vote Reloading the page 'disable' the service, even if it is far from ideal. I really like it though. I was looking for something similar for years.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
dood 18y ago
Interesting, any idea how this works? Edit: doh, source here: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability-0.1.js http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability-...
- aston 18y ago
 You edited to include the link to the JS, but here's my reading of it: 1) It pulls out content in tags (presumably those are the ones with data you want). 2) It rewrites double line breaks as paragraph breaks (in case the site isn't as semantic as it should be). 3) In order to pick the "main content" container, it looks for the container elm with the most s inside. 4) It filters the "main content" to remove stuff that looks like trash. Filters include having too much non- content, having too few commas, and too few words. 5) It rips out all of the HTML on the page and puts its own in, which also pulls together the user's selected style info. This is the sketchy step. I think an overlay might've been more appropriate here, but the comments imply the author had some difficulty there.
 - dood 18y ago
 Thanks, had a brainfart and forgot I could just read the code ;)
swombat 18y ago
Brilliant. I love the fact that it doesn't really change the look of my blog very much ( http://www.danieltenner.com http://www.danieltenner.com - once you're inside an article, applying readability with medium margins, newspaper look, large font, only gets rid of the red background and the image, that's all)
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
palish 18y ago
I like it. However, I found a site that breaks it: http://www.instigatorblog.com/the-art-and-science-of-the-small-exit/2009/02/04/ http://www.instigatorblog.com/the-art-and-science-of-the-sma... ... When I click my 'Readability' bookmarklet in Chrome, the main article is removed completely, and all that's left is the blog entry's comments. Here is the exact Readability bookmarklet I'm using: javascript:(function(){ readStyle='style-newspaper'; readSize='size-medium'; readMargin='margin-medium'; _readability_script=document.createElement('SCRIPT'); _readability_script.type='text/javascript'; _readability_script.src='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability-0.1.js?x='+(Math.random()); document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_script); _readability_css=document.createElement('LINK'); _readability_css.rel='stylesheet'; _readability_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability.css'; _readability_css.type='text/css'; document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_css); _readability_print_css=document.createElement('LINK'); _readability_print_css.rel='stylesheet'; _readability_print_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability-print.css'; _readability_print_css.media='print'; _readability_print_css.type='text/css'; document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_print_css); })();

101 points by KevinBongart 18y ago

It's slick, but does anyone else see the irony in the fact that they're not only running banner ads on the Readability site itself, but also (subtly) in the sites they're stripping the ads from? It's worth pointing out that, like it or not, we're not really entitled to escape banner advertising.

pixelmonkey 18y ago
Most websites with extended articles have links for "Printer-Friendly" pages. Am I violating a moral code by reading the articles in that form? How about when I walk away from my TV when commercials come on? That's what I usually do, when I'm actually watching TV, which is relatively rare. I also never bother reading ads in the newspaper. Sometimes, I fold the newspaper such that I don't have to look at the ad, and can focus on the content. Are you seriously arguing that just because a service chooses to show ads, I'm not entitled to actively ignore those ads?
- tptacek 18y ago
  I guess the closest you could come to a real "argument" in what I'm saying is: if we adopt technology that hurts the business models of ad-supported sites, we're inviting those sites to develop more intrusive ways of monetizing us.
  - erso 18y ago
    More intrusive? Could you cite examples? There is a business model that would afford the sites that are valuable to users to continue being operational: charging people. If ads can be circumvented, as we know they can, and your site relies on ads, maybe you should charge people outright for your content. If you can't make money by charging people, who cares if your site goes down but you? The value of a site cannot be determined by the operator of it. Only the users determine the value.
    - tptacek 18y ago
      Yes, easily. If browsers all had a big button for stripping ads and rendering pages in a "reader-friendly" style, all the major content sites would break all their stories into 10-page flows with timed interstitial ads.
  - ewiethoff 18y ago
    > if we adopt technology that hurts the business models of ad-supported sites, we're inviting those sites to develop more intrusive ways of monetizing us. So it's an arms race! If I take self-defense classes and install security systems, I invite muggers and robbers to develop more clever ways to monetize me! Yes, I'm speaking hyperbole here. But not really. I do find myself using the word "assault" in my mind when seizure-inducing computer graphics come at me. Likewise, by turning our heads away from our TVs during the ads, we "invite" the advertisers and stations to develop more intrusive ways of grabbing our attention. I think it was the early '90s when I started noticing ads being played at a louder volume. And in the past couple years, one of the stations here in NYC has taken to showing a bright flash between each ad, between each news preview. For the first couple minutes I happened to be facing away from the flashes, I seriously wondered whether a thunder storm was brewing. But no, it was my TV yelling, "Look at me! Look at me! Eyeballs! Eyeballs!"
    - tptacek 18y ago
      Thankfully, the browser vendors are not going to indulge you in this "arms race" fallacy, because most people don't want to antagonize the content providers.
      - ewiethoff 18y ago
        Mmm, you're the one who brought the word 'intrusive' into the discussion. I happen to be agreeing with you about increasing intrusiveness. I don't think "arms race" is a fallacy. Instead of advertising, think security for a moment. We all know browser venders are in a perpetual race against phishers and botnets and so on. So when Firefox came along, it billed itself as being "safer" than MSIE. Now think of pop-up ads. The browser vendors do indulge us in an anti-intrusive advertising race when the browsers block pop-up windows by default. My personal techniques against intrusion just happen to be a few steps ahead of Aunt Sally Sue's.
ewiethoff 18y ago
> we're not really entitled to escape banner advertising. "Oh, really?" I type into my heavily modded Firefox browser because some computer graphics give me brain seizures. (Too bad I cannot log into HN from my Lynx browser.) Last time I checked, the industry term for a browser is "user agent," and page rendering is under the control of the user agent. I can use whatever user agent I want, and so can you. I can fiddle with my user agent as I see fit, and so can you. That's what your browser's Options dialog is for. Sorry I'm getting really testy here, but I get tired of pointing out to the world that it's the user who is in control, not marketers, not page designers, not Yahoo! CSS Reset...
- tptacek 18y ago
  The same logic says that I should be able to strip the DRM off a movie I download from iTunes and share it to the world as a torrent; after all, it's my computer, and I'm the user, and I'm the one in control.
  - akkartik 18y ago
    I remember reading about a court ruling that copyright circumvention is different from skipping ads. So you can't pirate the DVD you just bought, but it's ok to fastforward past the previews. Somebody help me out..
  - sci 18y ago
    That's not, imho, a fair comparison - the user agent has the right to alter their perception of the content (strip ads, enlarge font size, have a screen-reader read it) - nowhere in that did the poster suggest that they are then free to re-distribute that content on to other users as your post suggests. I (humbly) put it that your logic is flawed.
    - tptacek 18y ago
      Hm, I think that's right.
      - 18y ago
brfox 18y ago
I think it is more ironic that an article talking about how people like to read things online does not actually explain in words what it is that their tool does - you have to watch a video to get that info.
imgabe 18y ago
I disagree. I am certainly entitled to decide what information does or does not get downloaded to my computer.

spydez 18y ago

Interesting note, for those of you uninterested in karma or user names, the bookmarklet will hide both. You'll still have your voting arrows and the comment text; you just won't know what everyone else thought of the comment (aside from their placement relative to each other). It's pretty neat to go on a big thread and hit the bookmarklet. e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501696

sjs382 18y ago

I like this a lot. It's sort of a bookmarklet for people who like to read "Printer Friendly" pages. Unless there's pagination, of course.

pixelmonkey 18y ago
You should check out the Firefox add-on "Print Hint": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/700 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/700 It will search a page for a "Printer-Friendly" link and display a glowing green printer icon in the bottom of your Firefox if it finds one. I find that on some pages, this can be a way to quickly navigate to a "Reader-Friendly" page that does support pagination. Of course, sometimes Print Hint doesn't detect a printer link, though I've never had a false positive.

sarvesh 18y ago

Useful but seems buggy. It disabled keyboard input completely in Opera.

kylec 18y ago

It could use more tweaking - I tried to read the latest pg essay with it, but all it would display was the image with the light "PAUL GRAHAM" text at the top of the page. I then tried to go back to the essay, but it looks like the only way to un-Readability the page is to reload it. I then tried to highlight the text that I wanted to read, but Readability doesn't take this into account when generating the page. When you have a service that guesses what the input is supposed to be, there should be a way to gracefully fail and allow the user to manually specify it, and if that doesn't work it should be easy to disable the service.

ewiethoff 18y ago
If you're a Firefox user and savvy about CSS selectors, I recommend the Stylish add-on (http://userstyles.org/ http://userstyles.org/). It lets you create blanket tweaks for all sites and specific tweaks for specific sites. And you can turn your tweaks off and on at will. It works even with Javascript turned off. I set colors and fonts and font sizes, adjust column widths, eliminate entire columns, make images semi-transparent so they don't bug me so much, etc.
- mnemonik 18y ago
  Also, if you're an opera user or have greasemonkey the styles can be loaded as userscripts, which will just use javascript to edit the css style changes you have selected. There are a few styles for Hacker News as well: http://userstyles.org/styles/search/hacker%20news http://userstyles.org/styles/search/hacker%20news
henryprecheur 18y ago
Being to select the chunk of text you interested would probably solve this issue. I wonder how Readability "selects" the "relevant" part of the page. Maybe it is just a smart heuristic about what the user want ;) Come from HN => must be a PG fan => Just display "PAUL GRAHAM" => Go back to HN and vote Reloading the page 'disable' the service, even if it is far from ideal. I really like it though. I was looking for something similar for years.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

dood 18y ago

Interesting, any idea how this works? Edit: doh, source here: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability-0.1.js http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability-...

aston 18y ago
You edited to include the link to the JS, but here's my reading of it: 1) It pulls out content in tags (presumably those are the ones with data you want). 2) It rewrites double line breaks as paragraph breaks (in case the site isn't as semantic as it should be). 3) In order to pick the "main content" container, it looks for the container elm with the most s inside. 4) It filters the "main content" to remove stuff that looks like trash. Filters include having too much non- content, having too few commas, and too few words. 5) It rips out all of the HTML on the page and puts its own in, which also pulls together the user's selected style info. This is the sketchy step. I think an overlay might've been more appropriate here, but the comments imply the author had some difficulty there.
- dood 18y ago
 Thanks, had a brainfart and forgot I could just read the code ;)

swombat 18y ago

Brilliant. I love the fact that it doesn't really change the look of my blog very much ( http://www.danieltenner.com http://www.danieltenner.com - once you're inside an article, applying readability with medium margins, newspaper look, large font, only gets rid of the red background and the image, that's all)

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

palish 18y ago

I like it. However, I found a site that breaks it: http://www.instigatorblog.com/the-art-and-science-of-the-small-exit/2009/02/04/ http://www.instigatorblog.com/the-art-and-science-of-the-sma... ... When I click my 'Readability' bookmarklet in Chrome, the main article is removed completely, and all that's left is the blog entry's comments. Here is the exact Readability bookmarklet I'm using: javascript:(function(){ readStyle='style-newspaper'; readSize='size-medium'; readMargin='margin-medium'; _readability_script=document.createElement('SCRIPT'); _readability_script.type='text/javascript'; _readability_script.src='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability-0.1.js?x='+(Math.random()); document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_script); _readability_css=document.createElement('LINK'); _readability_css.rel='stylesheet'; _readability_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability.css'; _readability_css.type='text/css'; document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_css); _readability_print_css=document.createElement('LINK'); _readability_print_css.rel='stylesheet'; _readability_print_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability-print.css'; _readability_print_css.media='print'; _readability_print_css.type='text/css'; document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_print_css); })();