The Safari Reader Arms Race

JimLynch writes "Apple, by adding Reader to Safari 5, is essentially trying to force an e-book style interface onto the web reading experience. It will never work out over the long haul because web publishers will resist and the end result will be an arms race, with publishers on one side and Apple on the other." Another unmentioned issue is that sometimes it doesn't work. I've found pages where content is omitted from the reader UI.

Comments

Forcing?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Safari 5, is essentially trying to force an ebook style interface onto the web reading experience"

Uhhhhh - you know it's not the default viewing format, right? So "forcing" is a bit leading.

Re:Hype!

[ifrag]

some other ad-blocking solution

For use on OS-X, probably using glimmerblocker. Nice for those using multiple browsers since it runs as proxy. Also never becomes incompatible between Safari versions (add-on experience in Safari has been less than ideal during transitions).

Re:Um, Nothing new here..

[figleaf]

There is a even a firefox addon for Readability.
Safari has apparently taken the code from Readability (it says so in the credits).

Isn't that the point of markup?

[AccUser]

Whilst I accept that a lot of people presume that the HTML served from their web server is going to be rendered as they intended in the client browser, that is not, and should not be a foregone conclusion. HTML describes content - it is then for the client browser to render that content. Extracting just the content I am interested in is surely a valid use of that content, and unless web sites start to use a different model for their content (i.e. restrictive) then this should not really be a surprise.

I have used Reader, and I personally like it, but I have only used in on a handful of websites that are chock-full of spurious crap other than the content I am interested in.