Postlight

I had the pleasure of visiting Dynamicland and hanging out with Peter Norvig, Nicky Case and many others. There's a few things that stuck out for me:

- The community! Most people I interacted with were pretty inter-disciplinary. Some came from an education heavy background, others from a more programming language background. Some from interface design, others from physical installation or video game background (and everything in between). Everyone had their own degree of skepticism but were excited by the discussions that were happening (a sign of a good research culture!).

- The representations: What excites me the most about Dynamicland is that it's an environment for fostering unique representations of ideas. The cultural forces & ideas (social programming, remixing, visible state / code at all times, 3d environment, etc) baked into the space encourage the experimentation & creation of new ways of representing complex ideas. Some scattered examples here - https://twitter.com/dynamicland1?lang=en

- Removal of artificial barriers: When programming on a computer these days, there's so many barriers to doing simple things. The amount of code that exists to do virtual actions in a virtual world is MASSIVE, and acts as a huge barrier. This is something Bret talks about at the end of his interview on Postlight (https://postlight.com/trackchanges/podcast/computing-is-everywhere). Because code / programs in Dynamicland are embodied in the room, you don't need code to move a…

Unnecessary duplicate "artwork" has always been a problem for digital mediums.

Example from the dark ages: naive (or lazy) CAD drafters would often draw overlapping lines, which then caused the pen plotter to draw that many strokes on the mylar, which would then have too much ink, botching the output. Enough of a problem that 3rd party tools popped up to dedupe plot files.

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Opera was onto something with server side rendering for their mini browser. They should sell that as a service.

In fact, someone needs to take it even further:

Render to some page description language (maybe PDF), and then automagically rehydrate into minimal, inferred HTML+CSS+images. Kinda like how tabula and others scrape PDFs to reconstitute tabular information.

One benefit is throwing away all the box model layout cruft. True WYSIWYG.

Another, even bigger, benefit is sanitizing content, like removing web bug tracking images.

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I'm currently test driving the Mercury Reader extension for Chrome. Ignoring all styling also sounds like a terrific idea. I may prefer this strategy. https://postlight.com/

I'm not sure where you can get the current code for Safari's Reader Mode but interestingly, it was based on the original Readability.js code, created and open sourced by a development shop called Arc90 [0]. As you noted, Firefox was also based on Readability (in the repo you linked to, you can see that it's copyright 2010 by Arc90). By this point both browser implementations may largely have been rewritten. Arc90 was acquired (oddly, by a short-lived EDM festival promoter called SFX), and its founder later started another agency called Postlight which created a similar extension for Chrome called Mercury Reader [1].

[0] https://jaxenter.com/safari-5-reader-based-on-open-source-readability-code-101504.html

[1] https://postlight.com/insights/the-postlight-mercury-platform-just-added-its-millionth-user

As a fellow old-schooler who's been getting back into JS myself, I've come across a couple of these types of resources that I found particlarly helpful. Here's the links:

- "Modern JavaScript Explained for Dinosaurs," by Peter Jang: https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/modern-javascript-explained-for-dinosaurs-f695e9747b70

- "Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers," by Gina Trapani: https://postlight.com/trackchanges/modern-javascript-for-ancient-web-developers

(Don't let the "ancient"/"dinosaur" stuff scare you off -- they kid because they love.)

Hope this helps!