Readability: the origins
Feb 20, 2016 Development Side project ManagementReadability is a browser bookmarklet (sort of like a bookmark on steroids). Readability works with most major modern browsers and has been tested on many news sites and blogs. It isn’t 100% effective but works surprisingly well.
The Readability code (including setup pages and supporting assets) is available on Google Code.
This experiment inspired at least three products:
In the post A Platform for Reading, teehan+lax describes the story of Readability and their collaboration making a new version for iPhone and iPad as it is nowadays.
When it comes to reading, the Web has become less than ideal. Hard to read type, bad layouts and increasingly larger format ads distract you from the content. It’s too common a feeling that sites try to get us to focus on everything on the page except what we came to the site to do… read the content.
We’re also facing an increasing number of content sources. We receive links to great content by email, RSS, Twitter, Facebook and other sites we regularly visit. How many interesting links do you see during your day but don’t have the time to look at them in that moment?
Readability is the platform for reading on the Web.
Readability started as an open source JavaScript library. In its earliest forms, it was code that let anyone take a web page and create a “clean” reading view of the page. Its code became widely adopted, finding its way into a range of Web apps and even software, like Safari’s “Reading List” function.
Readability started as a hobby project inside New York based Arc90. We had known about Readability since its earliest days. In 2009 we started working with their code when we were developing our app, TweetMag. By this time, Arc90 had separated Readability off into its own business. Readability was no longer an open source JavaScript library, but a full featured Web service. Its ability to take any Web page and parse it into a clean view was incredible. Its parser was, and still is the best available.
I use this kind of product from my Android phone and use it for reading later from web browser and tablet. But on the Android world the app that works better is Pocket. So I read my collected articles from my Android tablet and from the web browser.
From web browser I think Readability is the best way to read a post, better than Pocket. But from an Android tablet, the Pocket app is more reliable and works better.