Any front-end Web developers comfortable with Javascript would love to play with a tool as powerful as node.js. There’s just one snag: node.js doesn’t have a Document Object Model (DOM) or a Browser Object Model (BOM).  As a result, much of the functionality found in the browser is unavailable.  For example, commonly used functions like getElementById and getElementsByTagName or the ability to create document or window objects is unavailable. That’s hardly “Javascript” as commonly understood by most Web developers.

Enter JSDOM, the latest Arc90 Lab experiment. JSDOM is a library that enhances node.js by providing a BOM and a DOM that works like what you would expect on a browser.  It effectively gives you nearly all of the standard capabilities commonly built into nearly every Web browser available today. JSDOM is the brainchild of our very own (and very talented) Elijah Insua. Eli enjoys playing in the nether-regions of programming languages, and JSDOM is just one of his ambitious endeavors. JSDOM has been lurking on github for awhile as Eli has been working on the project. We’re proud to have it under the Arc90 Lab banner.

JSDOM is released and freely available for use under an open source MIT License.

We timed the project to coincide with SXSW 2011. In other words,  the actual release of the lab project would happen at a talk at SXSW…if the talk gets accepted. Well fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective) the SXSW Gods have spoken and we will be unveiling it in Austin next year.

Now, when we got this news it was a mixture of “oh cool!” and “oh shit.” This isn’t your typical slide deck with some graphics. We’ve got to go build this thing and have it ready. Fortunately, we’re going to be getting some help: Chris Fahey, Jeff Piazza and their team of design wizards from Behavior Design will partner up with us to build and present this tool. We’ve already been talking and we couldn’t be more excited about the possibilities.

If you’re attending SXSW next year, we hope to see you there.

Feel free to leave a comment below or email us with your response. The more information and details you can provide, the better.

The Decline of Print

It’s been well reported that traditional print publishing is in a state of turmoil today. For years, it has been experiencing a gradual decline in paper advertising and circulation. All the while, the ad revenue from Web properties has not caught up with the revenue lost on the print side.

In response, what has materialized is an almost frantic attempt to deliver as many ad impressions as possible alongside original copy on the Web. Some news sources and blogs do a better job than others, but many show no regard for the potential impact on the viewing and reading experience. The ad men have bullied their way into art direction and copy. In the fight to survive, the due respect that a quality piece of content deserves goes by the wayside.

But this isn’t only about ads.

When we created Readability, we built something we badly wanted. It turned out that legions of others wanted the same thing. So what exactly did we want?

We wanted a better reading experience.

Here’s the harsh reality for publishers big and small: when we read, we want to be left alone. If the article or post is really great, we really want to be left alone. The better the text, the more we’d like to be left alone with it.

So what needs to go away so I can read peacefully? Everything. Not just ads. Layers of navigation. Reams of “related” links. Article “tools” for sharing. Everything but the stuff worth reading must leave our line of sight. This is the place we all seek to be when we find something worth reading.

Beyond just a “clean” reading view, Readability has proven invaluable for people with vision problems and cognitive difficulties. We’ve received countless emails from users thanking us for making the Web usable again for them.

We wanted a consistent reading experience.

It isn’t only about removing unwanted elements to read peacefully. It’s about transforming a page so that it presents itself in a manner that the reader finds familiar. The Web is an incredible but wildly unpredictable place. There are no interface guidelines for the Web.  It can be experienced in countless ways. While some de facto design patterns have surfaced, there is no sense of consistency.

Apple enjoys substantial customer loyalty by exerting an unusual amount of control on how interfaces and content are presented. The typical iPhone application evinces a common set of patterns and elements that reinforce themselves across applications. The Web benefits from none of that. There is no “user advocate” for the Web.

Readability and its progeny impose an after-the-fact quasi-standard. By empowering users to effectively force a particular set of visual guidelines, we provided an antidote for inconsistency and unpredictability. I personally find myself clicking on Readability on sites that have no ads at all and are relatively well-designed. It isn’t just about removing stuff, it’s about imposing a consistent experience across the Web.

We wanted it on the Web.

Publishing has written off the Web. The line of argument is familiar: It’s messy. It’s cluttered. It’s unsafe. People expect everything to be free. As a result, publishing finds itself looking elsewhere to solve the puzzle of distributing and monetizing. Magazines like Time, Wired and Popular Science have decided to invest in delivering purchasable “packages” of their content that work on Apple’s iPad. Many magazines and newspaper subscriptions are available today on Amazon’s Kindle.

Why not the Web? How did the Web become relegated as the discount bin of content? The Web is perfectly capable of delivering a world class, beautifully designed reading experience.

For us, the Web is the right bet. The notion of tethering content delivery to a particular proprietary platform or hardware device is admitting defeat. Content is effectively locked up. It’s un-shareable, un-index-able, inaccessible and un-linkable. It’s a glorified form of paper.

Where do we go from here?

Let’s work back from what we believe everyone would like to see happen on the Web:

• We want a reading experience that is attractive, consistent and isn’t tethered to any single hardware or software standard, but rather works seamlessly on the Web and across various form factors and devices.
• We want a set of standards or design guidelines that publishers can opt into that deliver a consistent way of experiencing content.
• We want a way to package up or “bundle” discrete units of content (e.g. articles that comprise a magazine) and represent them in an easily searchable, findable way on the Web.

To date, Readability is purely an end user tool. As we look ahead, we plan to make it even easier for both users and publishers to deliver better reading experiences on the Web.

If you care about all facets of the Web reading experience – design, typography, semantics, technology – and are interested in helping us take Readability from a browser tool to a broader Web reading platform, we’d love to hear from you.

We’re incredibly excited about what we have in store for Readability. You can keep up with updates and announcements by visiting this blog or following us on Twitter.

We couldn’t be more excited about the path Apple has taken. Our own Readability led the way by empowering users and hinting to content creators that the experience around Web content is poor and oftentimes painful.

For us, the most exciting aspect of the announcement is that content display is being addressed on the Web. While content packaged “apps” litter Apple’s own iTunes app store with the promise of a better reading experience, it’s great to see the Web get its due attention.

Content on the Web can be all the things we’re looking for: an enjoyable clutter-free reading experience coupled with the unmatched capacity to touch and share content that only the Web can deliver. We’re thrilled that Apple has taken Safari in this direction. We’d love to see the other leading browsers along with publishers and content creators continue to improve how Web-delivered content is displayed and consumed.

It’s high time we fixed the reading experience…right on the Web.

Update: We’ve since discovered that Safari’s “Reader” feature is, in fact, based upon our own Readability.

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!

Today, we’re excited to announce an important update: Readability 1.5. Some of the changes are more subtle than others. We’ve been listening to your feedback and we’re working to improve Readability for everyone.

So, what’s new in 1.5?

99% Error Free!

We’ve spent a bunch of time making Readability’s parsing capability more robust and accurate. Whereas Readability would trip up on 10-15% of sites in the past, we’re excited to announce that our latest batch of testing shows nearly a 99% success rate on articles with this new version. We actually had a "Make Readability Better" contest within Arc90 and our own Chris Dary came away with the prize (more on that in a future blog post).

More Configuration Options

Starting today, you’ll find additional sizing and margin options for Readability. A lot of people out there asked for light-on-dark text and so we’ve answered that call as well. We’ve also included two brand new styles that feature Typekit fonts (see the next feature).

Typekit Integration

At Arc90, we’ve got a relatively unhealthy obsession with beautiful typography. Part of our  goal with Readability was to not only make it easier to read on the Web but to bring along some quality type to further enhance the experience. A couple of months ago, we reached out to the fine folks at Typekit to see if we can work together.

With today’s release, we’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Typekit to introduce two new styles featuring Typekit fonts.

Our new Inverse style features Betatype’s wonderfully readable Apertura. In addition, we’ve created a fifth style called Athelas which features – well – Athelas, an elegant font by Typetogether. Both fonts are available through Typekit.

Right-to-Left Support

For some of our foreign language readers, Readability would force text that should flow right-to-left justified (e.g. Arabic and Hebrew) to flow left-to-right. With this release, we keep intact the proper flow of text.

Other Little Tweaks

There are a host of tweaks and fixes we’ve made to Readability that are bundled with this release. Also, we’ve created new installation videos that are distinct for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, Safari and Chrome users.

If you’re happy with your current settings in Readability, you don’t need to do a thing to tap the newly improved parsing engine. If you’d like to play with the newly available settings, you’ll need to delete your bookmarklet and reinstall it from the Readability installation page.

We hope you enjoy (and keep enjoying) Readability. We’ve got some very (very!) exciting things in store for the future. You can stay up to date on Readability and all the other goings-on at Arc90 by visiting the Arc90 blog or following us on Twitter.

Now when you view a Readabilitied page, you’ll see a new “Help Haiti” link on the left that will take you to Google’s Haiti Crisis Response page where you can donate, volunteer, or provide or seek information on missing people.

Please understand that we don’t take this step lightly. Strictly speaking, we promised that Readability would remove extraneous junk from web pages, and now we’re violating that promise to suit our whims, however benevolent they might be.

We hope that you will forgive the betrayal. We’re keeping the link small and unobtrusive, and we have no relationship with the organizations listed other than deep appreciation for their work. We simply feel that, even in a difficult world, this disaster stands out in its scope and human cost, and we’d rather make Readability a little bit worse if we can make the situation in Haiti the tiniest bit better.

HashMask is another experiment in the middle ground between fully masked passwords (with bullets) and clear passwords. It uses visualizations of a password along with one way hashing to create memorable images that the user can use to confirm they typed the correct password.

Feedback on HashMask is greatly appreciated – please leave it in the comments or email me at chrisd@arc90.com!

HalfMask is intended to be a middle ground between fully masked passwords (with bullets) and clear passwords, as usability consultant Jakob Nielsen recently suggested in his AlertBox article “Stop Masking Passwords“.

Please leave any feedback on this experiment here – we’re curious to hear what the community thinks!