Thursday, August 20, 2009

[tnakhcda] Wide paragraphs

When a webpage consists mainly of text, or when the important part is so, for example a news article, the web browser may aggressively reformat the webpage to make it more pleasant to read. This aggressive reformating may include removal of navigation, branding, and advertising elements. It may also include adjusting the font, font size, color, letter spacing, line spacing, and (importantly) number of columns, because wide paragraphs are hard to read.

The user hits a button saying, "Reformat This Page For Reading", and rules, heuristics, artificial intelligence, or external resources are used to extract the "textual" segment of the page. As a first attempt, extremely simple rules such as View Source deleting all HTML markup tags works all right.

The user may highlight a section of the page indicating part of the important text, to give the artificial intelligence a hint of where the text is.

No comments :