The Bright Lines, as seen through 'readability'

Lately I came across Readability. It’s a bookmarklet (works only in FF, Safari and Chrome) that alters any website into a more readable one. It does so by presenting it in a book form. At a first glance I thought it as a nice  tool, but I wasn’t sure I was going to use it. Then I thought that it was a real good example that you as a user have more to say than you think.

We always accept the usability of the websites for what it is. If it’’s good, it’s good. If it’s bad it’s bad. But the frontend of the website is built on your computer, in your browser. You have a certain level of control over the HTML, CSS and Javascript.

The most common way to make a website better is by using ad blockers. Yes, some people do live of advertising, but I don’t think that means you should be obliged to see them if you don’t want to. Especially when they distract. The best thing about ad blockers is that it doesn’t require any knowledge of web development at all.

Another example is CoolIris that convert image pages of popular websites like Google Images or Flickr into a 3D wall of images.

A more techie Firefox plugin that I use is Stylish. I use it to add my own CSS to websites I regularly visit. Most of the time I use it to remove section that I regard useless with a simple display: none. A more powerful variation of Stylish is the plugin Greasemonkey. With Greasemonkey you can alter the websites with Javascript. And just like Stylish, you can publish your customization of the website through the plugin.

So that’s a reminder for me to see that websites are not cast in stone. Popular websites will on the client side be hacked by a small minority of users to cater their own needs. And if a site is really in need of improvement, plugins that help non-technical users would spread like wildfire.

Related posts:

1. Popups dodging popup blockers

Internet Explorer is the only browser that supports EOT, a font format that has digital rights management. That way you can make sure that your $200 font isn’t downloaded and used by everybody on the internet.

But like I said: IE is the only browser that can understand that file type. So Mozilla apparently implemented some sort of protection against font hijackers: It will only accept fonts from domains that specifically allow fonts to be downloaded. In case of Apache you have to add the following code below to the .htaccess file. I found it on Open Font Library.

<FilesMatch "\.(ttf|otf|eot)$">
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
</IfModule>
</FilesMatch>

This does not help you prevent people from stealing your font, but it will protect you from web developers who want to add the URL to the font on your domain in their font-face declaration. It’s not really a solution if you ask me. It seems more like a gesture to the creators of fonts.

It appears you could replace the asteriks with the domain of your website, but in my case (http://electricspace.blogspot.com/) did not do the job.

Related posts:

1. The trouble with @font-face
2. No sign of @font-face in Chrome 4
3. Webfont pitfalls
4. Web font rendering in IE9
5. New web font service: Ascenderfonts.com