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Is using a browser on a dumb phone with a WAP gateway creating a derivative work?

Is using the Readability bookmarklet creating a derivative work?

Both of these things have been happening for number of years (over a decade, in the first example). They simply reformat web pages.

Now that you've thought about these questions for a moment, consider: If they reformatted a web page and added advertising, does that addition of advertising affect the things status as a (non-)derivative work? (Aside from making you livid, of course. I'm not happy about ads, either.)

I've always wanted a browser that ignores all of those "suggestions" and just displays everything on the web in a uniform well readable style. Just not as boring as with disabling CSS completely.

The closest I've found for this is the Readability bookmarklet, which often does the right thing and produces readable text (including simple inline graphics!) in plain paragraphical form.

The AARD never worked in a shipped version of Windows. Stop getting worked up.
And Netscape made plenty of big mistakes, including this one http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Not to mention that the code was hugely bloated, that Mozilla Firefox is still trying to fix, after ~15 years. An OS that didn't ship with a browser would be laughed out of the market.

There are plenty of such stories about Apple or Google too, but they're not pushed like the MS ones seem to be.

For example, see how Google squashed Skyhook
http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit-motorola-samsung/

Aliyun and Acer prevented from launching a phone because of the secret rules of the "Open" Handset Alliance.
http://www.zdnet.com/cn/report-google-stops-acer-from-launching-aliyun-phone-in-china-7000004246/

Apple and the famed 30% cut of even sales from Apps, an example of how they used someone's OSS code in Safari and then banned them from the app store:
http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/

Yet you hate on MS and think of Google as a savior. Tell us, what is YOUR interest against Microsoft that you're spreading lies and FUD? The fact that your posts are modded up is the reason that Slashdot is losing readership as even the circlejerk echochamber gets bored with the same hating posts and posters.

Okay let me lay this down clearly because you're trying to mislead people here.

Apple charges 30% for two different thing.

1) App purchases. Eg. To buy Office for iOS
2) In-App purchases. i.e ebooks, or any service sold through the app, eg. Office 365 subscriptions.

For #1, for 30% they do payment processing (for which 3rd party processors charge about 2 to 5%), and promotion etc. which might
be worth 30% to some devs, but the problem is that they allow zero competition to the App Store itself. So if a third party wanted to do the same things as Apple but charge less, say 20%, they cannot. On Android/Play Store. THEY CAN. That is a big difference.

Coming to #2 is where your argument completely falls apart, as evidenced in the parent comments. Apple is not paying for Office 365 servers or hosting, nor for Netflix, nor for Readability nor for any of the apps' services that they either completel banned because they didn't pay the 30% tax for nothing to Apple, or forced to remove the link to the web site.

How is that not hurting developers?? Microsoft doesn't do #2, they only charge if you're using their infrastructure, zero if you're not.

Here's an assigment for you. Read the following links and come back and claim with a straight face that it's not hurting developers.

http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/48130-apple-forces-e-tailers-to-remove-in-app-links-kobo-to-offer-html5-browser-ereader.html
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2011/02/apple_bans_sony_e-reader_app_a.html

Check out http://readability.com/

It's made the web readable again for me.

Try Readability:

http://readability.com/

Also available as a browser plug-in.

A write up of why these studies are crap and why your belief that circumcision reduces the chance of penile cancer and STDs are unfounded.
The problem is, there will be no retraction in the news papers about this. Circumcision is completely unnecessary and is nothing but mutilation.

this is a far better article. In it, the author talks about how the case is being handled.

http://www.readability.com/m?url=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FG6iMlJ3G

Have you read this? Karl Rove is personally advising the Swedish govt on how to expedite him.

http://www.readability.com/m?url=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FG6iMlJ3G

Interestingly enough, the Tom's Hardware pages-per-article benchmark shows that Firefox can now handle an article spread over twice as many pages as before!

That's one area where Safari, the lowest scoring browser (in these Windows-based tests, natch) wins the day. It effectively has Readability built in, so it's one click to strip ads and consolidate pages.

For the rest, there's, well, Readability.

http://www.readability.com/articles/sagdka0j

I was impressed that it gets the first 11 pages, and then it includes a 'Next Page' link to in-line the remaining pages. The problem is it didn't get the performance images, which are in separate iframes.

The readable thing isn't much of an issue with this.

You could try readability: http://www.readability.com/bookmarklets It works well on my browsers, though I don't know if it will work on your browser.

Also, http://www.readability.com/

Basically re-formats any webpage into an e-reader friendly format

https://www.readability.com/articles/ddxb71oa
https://www.readability.com/articles/t97hwmtj
https://www.readability.com/articles/hbzksae7
https://www.readability.com/articles/lfgapxvs

https://www.readability.com/articles/ddxb71oa
https://www.readability.com/articles/t97hwmtj
https://www.readability.com/articles/hbzksae7
https://www.readability.com/articles/lfgapxvs

https://www.readability.com/articles/ddxb71oa
https://www.readability.com/articles/t97hwmtj
https://www.readability.com/articles/hbzksae7
https://www.readability.com/articles/lfgapxvs

https://www.readability.com/articles/ddxb71oa
https://www.readability.com/articles/t97hwmtj
https://www.readability.com/articles/hbzksae7
https://www.readability.com/articles/lfgapxvs

My eyesight is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20/300 on that scale. Corrective lenses (disposable contacts, in my case) work fine: I can see pixels on an iPhone 4 pretty plainly, despite what Steve Jobs might say about that. My vision has, pretty much, always been shit: I got glasses at around age 8, and contacts at 10. Perhaps I'm just lucky that my vision is usefully-correctable, but I digress:

I run my PC displays at absurdly-high resolutions (1920x1200 on a 15.4" laptop at the most extreme), and always have. I've even spent my share of time tweaking Modelines in XFree86 to get a few more lines out of a good CRT while maintaining a reasonable refresh rate and video quality, often to the extent that I found myself banging against the abilities of the RAMDAC in the video card to produce a good, clean waveform at such frequencies.

I wish I could afford a modern desktop display with higher DPI than the 20.3" 1600x1200 NEC IPS LCD before me, just so I could fit more pixels (and therefore more well-formed words) onto the screen.

These days, I often find myself making things smaller, instead of bigger, in web browsers. And, frankly, I haven't found much desire to make things bigger in many, many years -- ever since Windows XP started doing a reasonable job of configuring display resolution out of the box, Web designers have tended to use more reasonable layouts.

It used to be pretty bad, when Windows 98 would come up at 640x480 or 800x600 at default font size by default, even on a (then) big 17" monitor: Well-meaning designers/authors would shrink their font sizes on their pages to make the text and layout appear reasonable from the visual standpoint, just for themselves and without ever considering how it might look on a properly-configured display.

I believe this is about the time that browsers grew zoom functions. :)

But, as I said, that's been a lot better for a long time. Absurdly-small fonts still happen, to be sure, but so infrequently these days that I don't think about it much.

No offense, but: Is there something wrong with your eyes?

And meanwhile: Please check out Readability. I've got no relation to them, except that I've kept it on my Firefox toolbar for ages. AFAICT, it also works fine in Chrome. It turns horribly-designed web pages (hopefully with good information!) into completely-legible texts. I mostly use it to convert (the more modern trend of) pages that have light-grey text on a slightly-darker grey background into something other than mostly-invisible, but it also sanitizes font sizes/styles and (usually!) retains the important images in a page at a reasonable size.

It is also useful to me, even with my corrected vision, when I am either very tired, very drunk, or both, even on well-designed layouts.

>Why would it be about 30%, most web apps are free and 30% of zero is zero. Apple allow free apps in their store.

Not anymore if it involves any money exchanged between the user and the app provider. Now Apple is forcing (users of) subscription services like Amazon and Netflix to pay up 30%. ( an extra 43% to the user). It's curtains from June.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/19/AR2011021902399.html

Free app Readability already got banned for this.

http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/

Free Sony e-reader app banned:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2011/02/apple_bans_sony_e-reader_app_a.html

We're not talking about these apps which were native apps and not web apps.

I'm just saying that most webapps are free and so it doesn't affect apples profits whether they're distributed as webapps or through the app store.

Remember, when the iPhone was launched web apps were the only way to get your app on the phone. The app store came later.

>Why would it be about 30%, most web apps are free and 30% of zero is zero. Apple allow free apps in their store.

Not anymore if it involves any money exchanged between the user and the app provider. Now Apple is forcing (users of) subscription services like Amazon and Netflix to pay up 30%. ( an extra 43% to the user). It's curtains from June.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/19/AR2011021902399.html

Free app Readability already got banned for this.

http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/

Free Sony e-reader app banned:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2011/02/apple_bans_sony_e-reader_app_a.html

You should try Readability. They have an addon now for some reason, but the old bookmark version is still there: https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets

It makes any page readable (if it can figure out what the content is).

A feature I wish it didn't come with... 30% of subscription revenues from "publishers" like Netflix, Amazon Kindle etc.

See http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2011/02/apple_30_percent_subscription_tax.html

An app was already pulled for not paying up: http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/

Ironically it's the same app's OSS code that Apple used to implement the Readability function in Safari...
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/08/think-safari-reader-looks-familiar-thats-because-apple-used-op/

I guess no company is exempt from extreme corporate greed... sad to see other companies(especially little startups like Readability) get trampled on the way.

1. High margin sales of iDevices to iUsers
2. 30% of all app sales on all the iDevices by iUsers
3. 30% of all subscription revenue that all iUsers pay on all iDevices (will be implemented soon)
4. ???
5. Overtake oil baron Exxon Mobil as the world's largest publicly traded company with most market capitalization (well, gas prices are going up too.. will be interesting to see who wins this one)

Web site designers usually are users too and fully agree with you. But marketing seems to keep asking for it and I guess some people comply because they want to keep their job.

I think it is the job of browser vendors to make it easier for the user to remove/disable certain style types/elements so all that is left is the real content.

Like so:
https://www.readability.com/

I think Safari implements something like that as well ?

Only difference is, the user can make the browser display the content in anyway they want it displayed.

For example, like this:
https://www.readability.com/

I will admit that I could be ignorant. I'm not deperate.

Readability takes 30% of the money they make and passes 70% on to publishers. That's what their website says: "70% of all Readability membership fees go directly to writers and publishers." https://www.readability.com/publishers. Did they change that and not change their site?

Readability doesn't charge publishers. How ignorant or desperate are you?

Want a bet?

Safari comes with a Reader mode built-in, and there's the Readability add-on for Firefox and a similar one for Chrome. For general browser-agnostic solutions, often with mobile variants, there is the web version of Readability, or the Instapaper service.

To the best of my knowledge, all of those will slurp in multiple pages of an article when producing the clean/readable version of the article.

I tried reading the article, the screwed up page with all it's toolbars, ads and such kept refreshing after a few seconds and jumping to the top of the page. I was interested enough to go to the printer-friendly link an be able to finish the article.

"Readability" is your friend.

No, really. It's one of my favorite and useful toolbar application. It uses a JavaScript program to reformat the page you're viewing, trimming out all the trash.

https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets/