READABILITY BOOKMARKLET

In this year's Pogie Awards, David Pogue names Readability as the year's best tech idea. Readability is an awesome bookmarklet that attempts to scrape the current page for content the user likely wants to see (the main article, title, author, pictures) and removes everything else (menus, ads, fancy formatting).

The meat of this bookmarklet is in readability.js, which removes the stylesheets and scripts from the page, walks the DOM tree to identify the nodes that likely contain the relevant content, and formats this content with a clean stylesheet, using a few simple settings that can be configured in the bookmarklet. They use several simple heuristics to identify paragraph divs with relevant content -- including the number of commas in a paragraph as well as its overall character count -- that seem to work well for most typical sites. Also, since the current page doesn't get navigated, if it turns out that the pruned-down document threw away some useful content, a simple refresh gets you back to the original presentation.

In Firefox, the SiteLauncher extension provides a simple way to set up custom keyboard shortcuts to navigate a bookmark (or bookmarklet). If you're going to spend a couple minutes reading an article, this is a great way to get rid of all the extra fuss with a single shortcut.