By Steve Bass
Readability: Read Web Pages Without Clutter
Junk and clutter: It’s the blaring banner ads and annoying boxes that slide across the screen that are ruining the Web. I avoid it all with a smart ad blocker — Ad Muncher, a miraculous tool.
But there’s still a problem.
Web pages aren’t designed for reading, and that’s one of my pleasures: Reading product and movie reviews, for instance, or devouring John McPhee‘s lengthy pieces in The New Yorker, or James Fallows (read his old, but still valuable What Was I Thinking? in The Atlantic).
Up until now, I’d click the Print button if the site offered one. Then I discovered Readability, a site that reformats any page of text to conform to your reading style. Set up Readability by choosing a style, font size, and margin width, and then drag the Readability bookmarklet to your browser’s toolbar. The next time you’re on a Web page you want to read, click the Readability link and the transformation happens immediately. (You can get a better idea by watching the video.)
Arc90 calls Readability an experiment. I say it’s a keeper. Get more details at the Readability blog.
Atlantic article before using Readability.
Atlantic article after using Readability.
This post is excerpted with Steve’s permission from his TechBite blog.
