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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.
So they integrated a "Readability" feature into the browser.. So what.. I've been using this for quite a while as a bookmarklet in Firefox..
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Works great and does (nearly) the same thing.. (It doesn't pull in multiple page articles.)
But very clever, in an evil sort of way.
Anybody who develops for the web now has the choice of starving(if this catches on broadly), paywalling(good luck with that), or spinning a trivial mobilesafari-in-a-wrapper iDevice App, with the same content and Apple's unskippable iAds...
Safari only needs to have a reasonably high share within a certain target group for this to be a valid strategy. If the whole lot of Apple device users - Macs and i* combined - is essentially shielded from any ads but those served through iAd (or whatever the call it), that would indeed pose a significant issue for certain markets. It is not the death of the Interwebz, but I would not be so quick to dismiss this as a loony nutcase conspiracy theory.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Indeed. My take on this is that Reader could actually substantially diminish the need to install Adblock. This benefits the publishers since the whole page (including ads) loads and the user gets a chance to look at the full page before invoking reader.
For persons using screen readers to read web content (Apple VoiceOver, for example) the option to simplify the content of an article and automatically pull it together as a single page is wonderful.
Try closing your eyes and reading, via a text to speech system, a typical Forbes article broken across five pages packed with links, for example. This option or the Firefox Readability extension speeds things up something wonderful.
The primary reason why reverse-engineering is almost never done is that you can't use the result anyway. Copyright prevents that.
Nonsense. If that were true IBM would still be the only maker of PCs. Compaq reverse engineered the BIOS and the rest is history. Just because you reverse engineer something doesn't automatically mean a copyright violation. Reverse engineering happens legally every day. Patents can provide some protection against reverse engineering but copyright provides little in most cases.
With copyright gone, reverse engineering tools would become much much better.
Even if that were true (and I'm not conceding that it is - reverse engineering is and always will be hard) with copyright and patents there is no need for them. Why create an arms race those who want to hide code and those who want to reverse engineer it when with copyright and patents there is (generally) no need to do so? Your proposal would create additional incentives for people to hide their work instead of sharing it and we have enough problems with that already.