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Readable: A more readable version of "readability"

readable.tastefulwords.com

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

#41

Post by bluelu »

Our company (EDIT: not related in any form to readable or readability) does nonrss based crawling (blogs, news, message boards), so we spent quite some time on automatically identifying article, author and date and comments in articles.

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.

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

#42

Post by tastefulwords »

bluelu wrote: post #41

Our company (EDIT: not related in any form to readable or readability) does nonrss based crawling (blogs, news, message boards), so we spent quite some time on automatically identifying article, author and date and comments in articles. 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 m…

Would've been nice if you mentioned that your company has nothing to do with Readable, as there is a chance someone reading might get that impression -- especially for the short time that your reply is the first reply.

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

#43

Post by bluelu »

tastefulwords wrote: post #42
bluelu wrote: post #41

Our company (EDIT: not related in any form to readable or readability) does nonrss based crawling (blogs, news, message boards), so we spent quite some time on automatically identifying article, author and date and comments in articles. 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 m…

Would've been nice if you mentioned that your company has nothing to do with Readable, as there is a chance someone reading might get that impression -- especially for the short time that your reply is the first reply.

Sorry, didn't think about that. Edited it. thanks

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

#44

Post by tastefulwords »

bluelu wrote: post #43
tastefulwords wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would've been nice if you mentioned that your company has nothing to do with Readable, as there is a chance someone reading might get that impression -- especially for the short time that your reply is the first reply.

Sorry, didn't think about that. Edited it. thanks

Thank you, too.

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

#45

Post by shiven »

tastefulwords wrote: post #31
shiven wrote: post #30

I still don't get how/why is this different/better than the firefox readability extension? 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/

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…

Thank 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

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

#46

Post by mgkimsal »

j_baker wrote: post #4

"Legally, Readable's source is under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license." 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...

It's not recommended for code, but it's one of the few understandable licenses that includes "non commercial" clauses. I've got clients that want to put out code under "creative commons non commercial" because they don't want the code they paid for being used by commercial competitors, but they're fine with people using it non-commercially.

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?

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

#47

Post by tastefulwords »

shiven wrote: post #45
tastefulwords wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank 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

You'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.

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

#48

Post by mgkimsal »

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 defining/saving/using custom stylesheets, yet this (IIRC) was a selling point of CSS back in the day. Had we had better browser support for this, we may have had a much different web than we do today.

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!)

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

#49

Post by beaumartinez »

Sephr wrote: post #27
beaumartinez wrote: post #18

A great improvement over Readability! It's bookmarklet has been replaced, at least on my bookmark bar: it's faster, has increased customization options and justification, and is open-source... Add hyphenation to that mix and you've got a solid ten out of ten service. (Justification and hyphenation were the two features I always wanted Readability to have, and it always seemed odd to me that something branded "readabi…

Why would you want justification in something that's supposed to make something more readable ? Justification might make text look nice, but it's terrible for readability, and people with dyslexia often struggle at reading it, and the same usually goes for hyphenation.

Why, then, are books typeset justified and hyphenated?

> 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.

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

#50

Post by tastefulwords »

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.

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