Since Readability was released over a year ago, we’ve gotten an amazing amount of feedback on the tool. The great majority of it has been positive, but a sizable chunk of what we hear is about how Readability is an effective “ad-blocking” or “ad removal” tool. While Readability does remove ads, that was never its intended purpose. Its goal from the outset was clear: make it easy to transform nearly any Web page into a more comfortable and inviting reading experience.
With this goal in mind, we’ve taken a keen interest in Nick Carr’s evolving monologue on what the Web is doing to our brains. His recent Wired magazine article – The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains – is a pretty compelling argument for a tool like Readability. His upcoming book, The Shallows takes an even deeper dive into what the Internet is doing to our brains.
In a recent blog post on delinkification. Nick gives the beloved hyperlink a suspicious stare:
Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.
Ads (obnoxious or otherwise), sidebars, caked on layers of navigation – they all get in the way of the reading experience. Hyperlinks are a different animal. They’re potentially useful, but their temptation is distracting. Nick nails it: it’s a “more violent form of a footnote.”
The article clearly struck a nerve around the Internet, and it also struck a nerve with us. In response, we’ve decided to add a subtle but important option to Readability. Just below the style, size and margin options, you’ll find an option to Convert hyperlinks to footnotes:
If you check off this option upon installing Readability, it will:
- mask away all hyperlinks in the body text (they’re still links, but they’re hidden unless you hover over them)
- number all links in the body text and mark them via superscript
- list out all links at the bottom of the body of text.
In other words, it’ll turn hyperlinks into footnotes. If you already have Readability installed, you will need to reinstall it to take advantage of this feature (sorry about that). Here’s an example of what a typical New York Times article will look like with this feature is turned on:
There’s one additional bonus for authors. If you add a title attribute to your hyperlink, like so:
<a href=”http://link-to-another-web-page” title=”Here’s some information about this link.”>another viewpoint</a>
Readability will grab that text within the title attribute and display it in the corresponding footnote at the end of the document.
From the outset, we’ve always viewed Readability as a technology answer to a problem that technology created. In the spirit of continuing to improve reading on the Web, we hope you’ll enjoy this subtle but important update.
We’ve got big plans for Readability in the future. You can stay up to date on Readability and all of the other efforts at Arc90 (lab or otherwise) by visiting this blog or following following us on Twitter.
Happy reading!
Brian Doll said:
The benefit of hyperlinks within a body of text is context. Finding the context for a footnote, or scrolling down to a footnote when I want to visit a link, seems more pain than pleasure.
What if instead you just opted for a more subtle treatment of links in the CSS? A very slight change in color (dark grey vs. black) is likely to be easy enough to detect, but not enough to detract.
Kyle Gach said:
I LOVE Readability – thank you! – and use it dozens of times a day, but I must agree with Brian. Footnotes work well in an environment with no scrolling (e.g. a physical book), but they are not well-suited for a scrolling environment.
I too would prefer the simple (and context-saving) solution of a more subtle style for links in the applied stylesheet.
Rich Ziade said:
Brian & Kyle -
Thanks for your thoughts. We agree that this is a possible downside. Note that this is an option. I’m sure many people are perfectly comfortable with hyperlinks today. The goal here was to continue to explore new ways to improve the reading experience on the Web.
Clint Lalonde said:
I like the way you have done this and removed the styling, but not the actual link. The superscript is enough of a signal to me to know that the text just before it is still a hyperlink. Nice work!
Shane said:
I hope you update the Readablity extension for Google Chome!:D
Kyle Gach said:
@Rich
Until reading Clint’s comment, I did not notice that the links remain functional and are simply unstyled. That negates my entire argument and I’m already enjoying the new feature very much.
I think it’s great that Arc90 is experimenting with new ways to read on the web (and usually getting it spot on) – keep it up!
joel Levine said:
I love readability and use it all the time when annoyed with too many dancing adds competing for my attention. I do have a suggestion; many of the articles I read (like in the New York times) have multiple pages. These continuing page links are not in your readability version and it would be more convenient if the next page link were included.
Thanks for providing such a great tool!
Murray Jankus said:
It would be simply fantastic if Readability worked with Markit, or had a feature like it.
Thanks.
ian said:
Brian nailed it on the head. Links bring semantic context to the table. Obviously readability is enhanced by converting them to footnotes but then your page is not semantically linked to others on the internet completely throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Design wise this is progression but information wise this is regression.
Scott W said:
Brian and Ian, by default Readability doesn’t make the link to footnote conversion. You have to click the “Convert hyperlinks to footnotes” option. By default it works as it always has.
Fwiw, I think it’s a great option and will be using it regularly. A small footnote number is adequate context for me.
Mike T said:
Doesn’t seem to work for me. Using Firefox 3.6.4. Deleted my old bookmarklet and reinstalled Readability with footnote option checked. Gregor is still a link.
V. Khan said:
I like the conversion of links to footnote.
Brian, what you are giving as the negative seems to be what Readability was aiming to do. I don’t have a problem with the scrolling because Readability allows you to click on the superscript and jump down to the footnote at the bottom, which (clicking) isn’t a problem. Maybe, they can put a link at the end of the footnote to carry you back up to where you came from? I don’t think that would be necessary unless it is a very long document, but it is a very good idea.
Hyperlinks bring additional context by providing a (hyper) link to jump to it, that is the purpose of the hyperlink after all, but from what I gathered else where (this isn’t the first time I head about hypertext links making people not read through the entire document), it seems to take away from the reading of the document.
Converting the hyperlinks to footnotes seems to be a good compromising of converting the web features of the page to a more readable (and printable) form, which is what the Readability project aims to do.
What they *should* do with the footnotes is spell out the entire URL, especially for those who print from readability so they won’t loose the links. That would, however, give rise to dealing with very unsightly long URLs.
V. Khan said:
@Mike T, make sure and click the option to convert links to footnotes *before* you save the new Readability bookmark, otherwise the bookmark would work just like the old one.
Evaryont said:
The greatest benefit that Readibility provides is in it’s name.
Ian, this is not a regression information wise. The links are still there, and if a robot were to parse the page, nothing would change. The website still has the links, ready to be parsed out. The links are still noted, and are still functional, so a user can still click on them.
By moving them down to the bottom, you avoid the issue of hyperlinks distracting you. A win-win, I’d think. Let the robots handle links in the middle of the paragraph. I want to read the paragraph. A robot doesn’t care that the text is red on a magenta background. I do, and I want to *read* the web, not have a seizure or squint my eyes all the time.
Dale said:
My concern deals with the return from the hyperlinks. You click on a subscripted word and are transported to that location, but upon return to the original document, you have to re-enable Readability. If you ‘visit’ many hyperlink destinations, this can be real pain. Is there a way to keep Readability enabled throughout this process?
Anders said:
I like the conversion of links to footnotes, but unfortunately it really screws up the line spacing, at least in Chrome.
Dale said:
Just found the (obvious) work-around for my “problem” with returning from hyperlinks: Hold down the Command Key when you click on a link (creates a new tab), then when you return, just close that tab, and your in the original tab, just as it was when you left it — Readable!
Should have known that before I posted earlier.
Nathan said:
At least you made it optional, that’s about the only positive I see here (personally). Sill a bit amused that all your links are in context, in line and not sitting at in a footer though :)
Mike T said:
@V. Khan: Even if I’ve also got the “reverse nature of causality” box checked? ^_^
Yeah……still doesn’t work for me.
Chris Dary said:
@Anders – we haven’t seen that issue – could you send us a screenshot of what you’re seeing?
@Nathan – this was intentional, as we expected people to be running the new Readability on this page!
Peter B. Reiner said:
I would like to applaud you for making this option available. In one of the many comments on Nick’s original post, one of the more thoughtful suggestions (by Kevin Kelly) was to make comments invisible (or very very subtly visible), except when one runs a mouse over the relevant phrase, in which case it becomes clear that it is a link. I don’t want to add to your workload, but it might satisfy those who object to footnotes instead of contextual links.
david said:
Thank God you only made this an option. Nick Carr’s writing is short-sighted ill-considered pessimism if you’d broken Readability because of him, I’d have been livid.
(I’m working on the fact that such a petty thing would make me angry, but I’m not there yet.)
Crazyfinger said:
Great work you guys. Here is one suggestion. When using Readability on blog posts, it only shows the main post. To read the comment thread, I have to go back to non-Readability mode. If there’s a way to display both the post and the comments as a big long single Readability display, it’d be very useful.
Regards,
Crazyfinger
Mario said:
I really love this feature. I’m using Chrome and this new version doesn’t interfere with the look of the page. But one thing I hope you guys consider is removing the footnote superscript altogether. To me, this is the same as seeing the link. I see that footnote, and I know there was a link there and it’s still somewhat distracting to see it there when reading. It’s like you went half-way and stopped. Go all the way and remove all traces of the link! (except the hidden stylistic choice of hovering over it and seeing the link, that’s the best compromise). Thanks!
Anne King said:
Please! don’t ever remove the original option of having the hyperlink imbedded – I love it as I often use the hyperlink to enhance my understanding of the article.
I would like to access “Readability” thru using a hot key. Can you arrange that? Thank you.
Matt Saler said:
Glad to see you guys innovating with this bookmark. I rely on it every day for nearly all my online reading. One feature that I’d love is “single page” auto-detection. I’m always having to look for the print or single page version of an article before clicking the bookmarklet. If it’s not possible, no worries. It’s just a convenience thing and of course the blame for that lies with the sites I’m reading, not you guys.
One other feature that comes to mind is Instapaper integration. I often use the text mode of Instapaper and then kick in Readability. When it comes time to archive the article, however, I need to refresh to get the Archive button back. Could one of the Readability-provided buttons on the left be an Instapaper Archive button?
Hugh McGuire said:
Great work Rich…. would be nice if it were a toggle on the actual readability page, rather than a hard option in the bookmarklet….
George Monsour said:
Reflect the context in an on-hover fly-out when mousing over the footnote. I’m liking your work.
Clytie Siddall said:
I have concentration, memory and visual difficulties [1], so I’m deeply grateful for Readability. I use it to access web text, and find it copes very well with a wide range of webpages. I hadn’t thought much about the distracting nature of links, and how many brain cycles they eat. However, I had found that removing underlining from links did make it possible for me to read longer and comprehend more. (I actually started doing that in Vietnamese webpages, because the underlining interferes with a dot-below diacritic.) So I will grab the new version of Readability and benefit from the subtler link marking. :)
[1] M.E.
Hugo Villegas said:
Thank you guys for this wonderful tool. I use it since months now and I can’t imagine how to read articles on the internet without it. It is really very useful and that is why I’m glad to see you are improving it.
Thank you again.
Zane said:
Thanks for the new version – very good work! I really like footnotes instead of hyperlinks. And I like being able to click on the carat character next to the footnote to return to the footnote’s ‘origin’.
Christopher Burd said:
Instead of converting them to footnotes, why not to sidenotes? Sidenotes (placed in the margin next to the reference) went out of style in printed books when margins shrank from their Mediaeval/Renaissance expansiveness, but Readability leaves plenty of room for them on a typical landscape screen.
Mike said:
Any chance of this coming to Readability Redux?
Brennen said:
Nice. Sort of reminds me of dumping web pages to text with Lynx.
Crazyfinger said:
Wow, you guys implemented the feature I requested in an earlier comment, terrific! Thanks a bunch!
Crazyfinger
IIsi 50MHz said:
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Actually, I’ve always regarded footnotes as the violent intrusion. Even before hyperlinks existed, I found footnotes immensely irritating. Each time I encounter one, I have to decide whether to check it or not, while knowing that if I “decide to check it later” I will probably never check it. With each book, article, or other source, I never know in advance whether the footnotes style will be to tell me that a particular sentence references “Foobar’s Bar, by J. Random Writer, page 17, line 8, from the 1987 second edition” or will explain the sentence in more detail, or even explain additional semi-related information.
Actually, in some writings both types are used, meaning that I have to check every footnote to see whether it’s merely a source reference, or explanatory. With footnotes, I have about a 50% chance of choosing correctly when deciding to follow them, and approximately a 12.5% chance of learning something useful (since most footnotes are just references to sources)…perhaps also, a significant chance of loosing my original page and line.
The “Foobar’s Bar” sort of reference is generally useless to me (since I am usually not in a position to find a copy), and thus a waste of time; having followed the footnote and discovered this kind of reference, I’ve gotten nothing useful for my trouble. With the latter type, it generally leads to greater understanding at the same cost as the former: having to find the footnote, read it, and then find my original place. Often footnotes are placed at the ends of chapter or the ends of books, rather than the end of each page, which can lead to excessive use of fingers as bookmarks.
Altogether, I was getting set to be quite irritated with the logic behind downgrading hyperlinks to the user-unfriendliness of footnotes, until I came to this page and read that the links are actually still there, just not apparent. That momentarily gave me the idea that Readability pages with footnotes enabled would be great for reports and such, but then realised that the printed version still would not have the link addresses written out. Ah, well.
Someone suggested removing the footnote markers entirely, just leaving the “hidden” links – Peter B. Reiner, I think. To that I would say: what do you estimate the chances are that someone would dutifully run the mouse over every word to see if it turns into a link, even if they have been told that links become visible when you do so? In many cases, people would end “guessing” where a link might be, based on what they’re interested in or what they feel needs more explanation, and discover that what they pointed that mouse at was /not/ something the author had considered worth linking. OTOH, footnote markers are generally ugly to me, and I assume such a feature would be configurable by each user, so what’s the harm to those who like it?
–
Perhaps I should have stuck with the short-short version “Down with footnotes, up with hyperlinks!”. I was tempted to go on with “People learn less with hyperlinked text? Sounds like rubbish to me.” but then I would be obligated to go read the research, google some counter-indicative research, and perhaps perform some test protocols of my own. I’ll just leave the “learning” bit our as a “Maybe…” then.
Right, I seem to have run out of rant. Carry on (-:
Mike D said:
This is great, use this bookmarklet all the time. I also use it to get a clean print mode to a page I want to print out and read away from a computer. I like the addition to the footnoted link, but I was hoping to have the full URL to the link so I could go back to it if needed from the printed output. Just showing the root domain doesn’t help find the exact link. Could the full link/URL be added to the footnote?
Thanks.
Babatunde Adeyemi said:
A day rarely passes without my use of this tool. Thanks for creating such an amazing tool
Haakon said:
How you manage to make this solution even better tells me you guys should probably just go in to your bosses office (if applicable :P ) and demand 1337% more…
okay that was cheesy but thanks for making a seeing person able to read again! ;)
Bennett McElwee said:
I love Readability. it’s pretty much perfect when reading on-screen. However, printed pages demand special handling of links. Here are my suggestions:
In normal (non-footnote) mode, style hyperlinks like normal text (no underlines, etc.). After all, on a printed page they are not hyperlinks any more!
In footnote mode, display footnotes with their full URL instead of just the domain. Otherwise they aren’t much use.
Do these with a print style sheet so that the on-screen display doesn’t have to change.
Mark A Johnson said:
I noticed that the “Convert links to footnotes” script has an exclusion for Wikipedia (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability.js).
I love Wikipedia, but boy, if I had to identify a single site that shatters my focus, it’s Wikipedia. In fact, Wikipedia has to be the perfect example of the tension between more information and information overload.
Can you provide any hints why this exclusion is there? Is there any way around this? Are there any plans to remove this exclusion?
Chris Dary said:
Hey Mark,
It was probably a bit of a copout on our end, but the reason we decided to skip wikipedia is because it already has a large number of footnotes within it (which are citations in wikipedia’s case), and it ended up rendering really poorly as a result. We just weren’t sure how to fix that particular issue, so we decided to forgo the footnoting for it.
Hope this helps – any thoughts on how to better solve it would also be appreciated.
-Chris
Mark A Johnson said:
I just modified the script on my machine to work with Wikipedia, and took out the footnotes. The links are still identifiable when I pass the mouse over them and that’s sufficient for me. It’s entirely too distracting to try to make it through an entire Wikipedia article with all the links and things leading me elsewhere.
I would love to see more work on Wikipedia to remove all the “Edit” items and “See Also”, etc. Wikipedia is not crazy-ridden with advertisements, like Yahoo News or other sites. However, it’s got its own well meaning, but still distracting, links and references and footnotes and etc, etc. It’s very useful just to have a simple article to read, rather than a crazy crossroads of infinite links.
Thanks, again, for all your work. Readability is definitely a top tool for me.
VANJ said:
I love Readability, keep up the great work. One thing that can be improved..articles on the Economist (http:///www.economist.com) usually contain a couple of pictures, it would be great if Readability preserved these. Thanks.
Peter said:
I support the suggestion of Bennet. Complete URLs in the footnotes would be great for printing. Great tool anyway.