To show of the functionality for first time page landers you should pre-populate with a popular article url. I had to open a new tab and find an article to test. I almost didn't come back. Almost, but glad I did!
Could the browser tackle this? If I understand it correctly, in broad strokes, nothing comes down unless the browser asks the server for it.
I'm dating myself, but when I first learned about HTML, the idea was that text would be organized so the browser could make it more readable for you, based on your needs. For instance, a deaf person could use a text-to-speech browser, and perhaps the heading tags would help them navigate the document.
Today's web page simply treat the screen as a graphical canvas.
In those old days, I also learned that having a crummy obsolete browser for my crummy obsolete computer actually sped up browsing because my browser was simply incapable of downloading the stuff that ate bandwidth.
That is correct. justread will save you data compared to loading the original page. No javascript, ads, extra images unrelated to the article etc. It does, however, keep the images, since often they are an interesting part of an article.
Anyone who thinks speedreaders like this are a good idea should look into the opthtamologist Bates' research and method. Reading without moving your eyes equals tension and stress on your eyes and related muscles (neck, shoulders.) It's a great way to increase your need for glasses.
It's been on HN a while back, but while using it in practical cases like WSJ, it seemed to pick up HTML code, whitespace characters and/or text from a sidebar.
I ditched it at the time, but I may try to start using it again if I can get it work with ebooks.
I've added bookmarklets for both, and you can Clean (which sorts out multi-page articles, sidebars etc.) then Squirt to speed-read the resulting article. They really do go hand-in-hand.
oh my god. that is an amazing tool. really hard to say but I don't think I caught everything or remember everything I read but do feel like I can understand what I am reading. I keep trying to sound out the words and give up and begin look at the words only like pictures. its a surreal experience.
I didn't know they had an API. Would it be easy to create a bookmarklet that used it? I don't like their extension, it feels too heavy. I want something that doesn't run until I invoke it.
By the way, does anybody here know of an algorithm (and/or already implemented open-source library/app) that copes well with auto-extracting content from forum-like websites? (i.e. phpBB, StackOverflow, HN, reddit, ...)
Umm... anything that uses xpaths should work I would think.
Apologies for blowing my own horn but I've had some luck filtering HN and reddit with this project I built (I used to have an example in progress online but i've taken it down): https://github.com/kennethrapp/embedbug
The point is I want some heuristic that would work "automagically" (like Readability, etc), not requiring me to invent a tailor-made xpath for each and every such website in the world.
It has a default extractor, and site-specific recipes use the same format as Instapaper, so you can leverage the work Marco has done on different sites.
Original: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132517/the_rise_and_fa...
Awesome tool!