Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Readable: A more readable version of "readability"

readable.tastefulwords.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 93 posts

Re: Readable: A more readable version of "readability"

#51

Post by mgkimsal »

tastefulwords wrote: post #50
mgkimsal wrote: post #48

Maybe a bit off topic, but readability, readable, instapaper, etc - weren't user-defined style sheets supposed to address at least some of the issues these services are addressing? I ask because it seems that sometimes we get decent tech ideas (the idea behind CSS is good at least) but then we settle for half-baked implementations and don't pursue good user tooling. CSS specifically - no browsers have good ways of de…

Couldn't agree more. If user defined style-sheets worked (and if content and presentation were truly separated) the web would be a much better place. 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.

BTW, this wasn't a bash at you at all (if you took it that way). More a lament that we ended up in this chicken-and-egg situation. No point in making user-css tools because there's so much inline style and mixing, and no point in moving towards building sites with user-defined CSS in mind because there's no good support in browsers.

Re: Readable: A more readable version of "readability"

#52

Post by riobard »

ambiguity wrote: post #23
riobard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Readability 2.0 choosing to load and reformat the pages via their server instead of doing it in place in browser really slows it down.

It does make it nice that I can share links to the "readable" version with other people.

Presumably it could be done by embedding the link in the same page.

Re: Readable: A more readable version of "readability"

#53

Post by tastefulwords »

mgkimsal wrote: post #51
tastefulwords wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree more. If user defined style-sheets worked (and if content and presentation were truly separated) the web would be a much better place. 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.

BTW, this wasn't a bash at you at all (if you took it that way). More a lament that we ended up in this chicken-and-egg situation. No point in making user-css tools because there's so much inline style and mixing, and no point in moving towards building sites with user-defined CSS in mind because there's no good support in browsers.

Don't worry, I didn't take it in a bad way. And I do, actually, completely agree with you; I thought that my comment made that clear -- but I do appreciate you making sure I didn't take offense; that kind of courtesy is rare.

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 :)

Re: Readable: A more readable version of "readability"

#55

Post by ggchappell »

What about printable?

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.

Re: Readable: A more readable version of "readability"

#56

Post by mgkimsal »

tastefulwords wrote: post #53
mgkimsal wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW, this wasn't a bash at you at all (if you took it that way). More a lament that we ended up in this chicken-and-egg situation. No point in making user-css tools because there's so much inline style and mixing, and no point in moving towards building sites with user-defined CSS in mind because there's no good support in browsers.

Don't worry, I didn't take it in a bad way. And I do, actually, completely agree with you; I thought that my comment made that clear -- but I do appreciate you making sure I didn't take offense; that kind of courtesy is rare. 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 peopl…

Yeah, I was probably writing back more to assure anyone else reading it that I wasn't bashing you :)

Thanks for some great work, by the way!

Re: Readable: A more readable version of "readability"

#57

Post by tastefulwords »

ggchappell wrote: post #55

What about printable ? 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, doe…

I'm not aware of the problem you're describing. And I can't seem to reproduce it.

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.

Re: Readable: A more readable version of "readability"

#58

Post by tastefulwords »

mgkimsal wrote: post #56
tastefulwords wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, I didn't take it in a bad way. And I do, actually, completely agree with you; I thought that my comment made that clear -- but I do appreciate you making sure I didn't take offense; that kind of courtesy is rare. 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 peopl…

Yeah, I was probably writing back more to assure anyone else reading it that I wasn't bashing you :) Thanks for some great work, by the way!

You are most welcome.

It was -- and still is -- my pleasure.

Re: Readable: A more readable version of "readability"

#59

Post by ggchappell »

tastefulwords wrote: post #57
ggchappell wrote: post #55

What about printable ? 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, doe…

I'm not aware of the problem you're describing. And I can't seem to reproduce it. 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 foru…

I'll do both (report here & there).

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.

Re: Readable: A more readable version of "readability"

#60

Post by alok-g »

tastefulwords wrote: post #57
ggchappell wrote: post #55

What about printable ? 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, doe…

I'm not aware of the problem you're describing. And I can't seem to reproduce it. 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 foru…

Easily reproduced. Tried on the following page:

http://www.go-hero.net/jam/11/languages

Post reply on HN