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Startup idea for you: A button to make websites readable

8 pointsby CatDanceralmost 17 years ago
The world is full of unreadable websites: sites that have poor contrast such as dark gray text on a light gray background; sites that have tiny fonts; sites that obscure their content in a sea of advertising and widgets, sites that block their content with popup advertising...<p>These unreadable websites are especially painful for older people to deal with, since often their eyesight isn't as good as it used to be, and not being as tech savvy they are more easily confused by clutter and distractions. But the older demographic isn't a bad one for startups to target though, since one thing older people do have is money.<p>This startup idea is simple: create a bookmarklet (see, for example, http://www.google.com/bookmarks or http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html) labeled "Readable". When the user gets to an unreadable page, they click on your "Readable" button in their bookmarks toolbar, and your site renders for them a readable version of the page that they're on.<p>You can include a small, tasteful header at the top of the page which includes a "Nope, not good!" button which gives you immediate feedback on which pages you are messing up when you try to render them in a readable fashion.<p>The core algorithm could be pretty simple: scan the page for the larger blocks of natural language text and display that. You don't have to be perfect, since if you miss anything of importance on the page the user can always click the "back" button to return to the original.

15 comments

brmalmost 17 years ago
There is a huge difference between cool/ interesting idea and good startup idea.
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Tichyalmost 17 years ago
I find it a little bit annoying if every tiny project is called startup.
joshsharpalmost 17 years ago
Not to be facetious, but can't you get this by choosing View &#62; Page Style &#62; No style in Firefox, to remove all stylesheets?
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carlioalmost 17 years ago
Add this as a bookmark:<p>javascript:location.href = "<a href="http://www.google.co.uk/gwt/n?mrestrict=xhtml&#38;u=" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.co.uk/gwt/n?mrestrict=xhtml&#38;u=</a>" + location.href<p>It uses Google transcoder. I've only tried this in Firefox but it should work in IE too.
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chrisbroadfootalmost 17 years ago
Doesn't startup imply business?
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oribalmost 17 years ago
This is not a startup idea. It may be a small Firefox (or even Greasemonkey) extension. <i>However...</i><p>This is one of the reasons I think CSS should have been designed to be selected client side, not server side. (in other words, the CSS is selected by the user's browser options)h I should be able to decide how I view my websites, not some two-bit wanna-be web designer who thinks that black text on a black background makes GREAT contrast.<p>Ok, I exaggerate, and it's only rarely that I come across sites that are that horrid (that I still want to read, at least), but the point I'm making is that the theming should be in my hands.<p>If HTML was more semantic (&#60;navbar&#62;&#60;navitem.../&#62;&#60;/navbar&#62;) it might even mean that mobile browsers don't have to work as hard trying to figure out what to do with massive sidebars that push the content down 30 scrollbar lengths; they just shove the &#60;navbar&#62; stuff into a dropdown menu, for example.<p>And thus ends my mini-rant about annoying style issues. Things are too embedded to change any time in the near future, even if everyone on the W3C completely agreed, but one can still dream...
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jodrellblankalmost 17 years ago
<a href="https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html</a><p>I use one of those quite often - I think the "zap" one.
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MrUnderbridgeover 16 years ago
"The world is full of unreadable websites: sites that have poor contrast such as dark gray text on a light gray background"<p>Is this for real? You just described this very page.<p>I wouldn't pay money for this if some "startup" was selling it, but I did take the trouble to create an account so I could post a big WTF in ya face.
tzuryalmost 17 years ago
I think your idea is great. Though you cannot make a startup out of a button (some have tried to make a pot of soup out of it see @ <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Button-Soup-Bank-Street-Level/dp/0553373412" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Button-Soup-Bank-Street-Level/dp/05533...</a>).
atestualmost 17 years ago
Instapaper (<a href="http://instapaper.com" rel="nofollow">http://instapaper.com</a>) does that.
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gtanialmost 17 years ago
there's one browser that makes this problematic. Guess which browser that mght be<p><a href="http://21ccw.blogspot.com/2008/04/ie7-page-zoom-broken.html" rel="nofollow">http://21ccw.blogspot.com/2008/04/ie7-page-zoom-broken.html</a>
paraschopraalmost 17 years ago
Why don't you simply do it then? Stop discussing here and start doing.
austonalmost 17 years ago
..or you could just remove styles and increase text size.
robgalmost 17 years ago
Try ctrl+ in firefox.
geuisalmost 17 years ago
wow, so many comments to a simple problem.<p>File-&#62;Print preview