Readability 2.0 prototyping
Posted by: stak
Tags: mozilla
Posted on: 2012-08-17 10:39:28
I spent the last week in Boston at the mobile work week. It was a lot of fun, and we made a lot of progress in terms of both planning for upcoming features and just hacking away at code. One of the things I'm working on (along with the rest of the Readability 2.0 team) is cooking up some prototypes for the Readability 2.0 effort. This effort is basically focused on trying to improve the readability of text when browsing on Firefox for Android. In our current release (Firefox 14) we have an implementation of font inflation by jwir3 and dbaron. However we are exploring ways to improve this for future releases.
The TapTapWrap addon that I blogged about before was my first attempt at trying something that might help. The most recent prototype that I have takes a different approach, and overlays out a XUL iframe with the relevant content when the user double-taps on a page. The current very rough prototype ends up looking something like this:
XUL iframe overlays
Since the content nodes are copied from the original page into the XUL iframe, we are able to sidestep concerns about modifying the original page DOM or running into issues with constrained heights as we do with font inflation or other approaches. We are also free to style the content to make it more readable, similar to what we are doing with Reader Mode (in fact, you could think of this prototype as a mini-reader-mode).
Ideally, the overlays would be scrollable, and you would also be able to click on links in them. Right now, however, we are having some issues with touch event dispatching that prevents the prototype from having that behaviour, and I'm working on tracking that down.
This prototype is just one of a few different approaches that we're exploring for Readability 2.0; another that jwir3 is working on is similar to what Opera does, where we set a maximum line width on the relevant block of text, so that it wraps to the visible window (this is commonly known as "reflow-on-zoom") and is also very promising.
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Unfortunately at some point the add-on stopped working because of changes to the Firefox codebase, and I didn't have the time or energy to fix it up. The old code for it is still at https://github.com/staktrace/taptapwrap - feel free to fork it and update it as needed.
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I was trying enabling/disabling different add-on on my Android tablet's FF, trying to find a way to make the text more palatable to my weak eyes, and accidentally deleted my TapTapWrap.
It doesn't show up in search in the Add-On's page, and when I finally force-fed a web address, there's a note that it was deleted by the author - but no note as to why, if it was replaced, if it was no longer needed, etc.
Whatever happened to my beloved TTW? Of course, you'll probably tell me that the functionality that I need is already in this newer version of FF - but a) I didn't know that, and b) well, enquiring minds want to know.
Thank you,
MDV