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 ...
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 Readability as a version of Readable :)
The only reason I didn't kill Readable after that, was that it was different enough from Readability to diverse it's own shot -- plus, I love working on Readable's text-parsing algorithm; it's a very cool problem to solve.
P.S.
The extension you pointed to is based on the first Readability bookmarklet -- and it's made by a guy who also made an extension based on the first version of Readable.
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!
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.
Author of the JS implementation here. Let me know if you have any questions about the implementation or problems integrating it. I was hoping someone would pick it up and integrate it with Readability-like service. (I've slowly been working to add support for it to Treesaver http://www.treesaverjs.com/.)
For hyphenation you might also want to check out my Hypher project (https://github.com/bramstein/Hypher) which is a minimal hyphenation engine written in JavaScript. In my benchmarks it is about 4 times faster than Hyphenator.js (and a lot smaller.)
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/