08 June 2010, 12:02

Apple's Safari 5 Reader incorporates open source tool

The new release of Apple's Safari 5 incorporates technology from an open source project to create more readable web pages; the feature is one of the top billed new capabilities of Safari 5. The "Readability" project from Arc90 Labs is available to download from the project's Google Code pages under an Apache 2 licence. Readability is installable in most browsers as a bookmarklet which can remove the clutter around web page content to reveal and reformat the text content within the page.

Apple have incorporated this technology into Safari 5 which, instead of using a bookmarklet, displays a Reader icon on the right hand side of the address bar whenever it detects the user browsing a page suitable for reformatting. Clicking on this icon displays the reformatted article. Users of other browsers who want to make use of the Readability technology can visit the Arc90 Labs Readability experiment page where they can create their own bookmarklet, with their selection of reformatted page style, font size and margins.

(djwm)

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