Safari reader, something that I read about and didn't really see as being particularly useful. Having tried it today (in the new Safari 5) I am positively surprised. Of course I went looking for things that might work in it first.
You can see that it quite cleverly lifts the content away from the rest of the page, and by doing so does improve readability. Whilst this alone is helpful, if not world changing, the effect on multi-page articles (you just have to scroll, not click through each page) and for printing (just the text, hopefully the graphics, but they're not always picked out) are really nice additions.
The downsides however are that it doesn't seem to work everywhere - even places where you think it might. Looking into how this works revealed some discussions on the excellent stackoverflow.com about How to enable Safari Reader on my website. Disappointingly it seems that having lots of paragraphs containing text with full stops (periods) is the most effective. Hopefully soon it will be responsive to the HTML 5 Article tag.
Why does the page have to load first? The Register has an interesting take on this suggesting that stripping out branding, adverts and other extraneous information from content has the potential to violate the terms of a number of sites, but by requiring the user to press the button each time (or use the Apple-Shift-R shortcut) at least Apple aren't in the frame for this (they hope).
As a user of the feature it is a little annoying - especially since the address bar loading indicator seems to take longer than ever to finish (even when the page has apparently finished loading) - but I can understand that content owners are keen to maintain revenues and as I personally don't want everything moving behind pay walls I think I can live with it as it is.
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