While reading is one of the main activities on the Internet, a lot of sites pay very little attention to the readability of their text. Instead, the reader's eye is constantly drawn to other UI elements, ads, and widgets. Arc90's Readability experiment is setting out to change this. Readability is a small bookmarklet that extracts the text from almost any web site and displays it on an easy to read page that removes all of the clutter that can make reading on the Internet so hard sometimes.
Installing Readability is easy - all you have to do is select your favorite settings for style (newspaper, novel, eBook, or Terminal), size (small to extra large) and margin (narrow to extra wide). After that, you simply drag and drop a link to your bookmarks. To activate Readability on any page, you simply click the bookmark.

Readability doesn't work on every site, but we tested it on most popular news sites and blogs, and it worked almost everywhere. Most of the time, Readability will also display comments when you are reading a blog post. While it displays most images, however, the bookmarklet sadly deletes every embedded video.
Removing the clutter, of course, also means removing the advertising that a lot of sites need to run to make a living. For sites that rely on click-through ads, Readability is just about as bad as AdBlock Plus (or the more anarchic Add-Art), but sites that get paid per ad impression probably won't care too much about this, as the regular page still has to be loaded before you can activate the Readability bookmarklet.
Instapaper, which Arc90 credits as an inspiration, of course, also has a text-only reading mode for saved pages, but its focus is less on making the text readable and more on saving a copy of the page. Unlike Readability, Instapaper also doesn't display any of the images embedded in a text.
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Wow, now the Internet will be just like a book. All text, no razzmatazz. Back to the old ages. Since I love books, I'm fine with this turn of events.
Hi,
very interesting, although I highly doubt that marketers and advertisers will be very fond of this…
However, this service will most likely be very useful for the reader and increase their productivity. Thumbs up.
All the best,
This is really great idea!
But extracting the right content can be tricky. Just try it on this page (rww page about Readability).
While heuristics can get you to 95% or so, you'll need some machine learning and similar approaches to get to 99+% accuracy of extraction.
I haven't yet seen really good extractor written in JavaScript, so I have to say this is the best one yet!
Oh, guys, please add a back button.
bye
Andraz Tori, Zemanta
you may like this new service at http://www.tidyread.com/. TidyRead is a service that extracts the text from almost any web site and displays it on an easy to read page that removes all of the clutter that can make reading on the internet so hard sometimes.