There’s a general agreement that the “mobile” user is not to be trifled with; give them the content they want as quickly as possible ‘cause they’re in a hurry. But the corollary does not hold true. Why do we think that the “desktop” user is more willing to put up with having unnecessary crap thrown at them?
Unnecessary page cruft is being interpreted as damage and routed around with tools like the Readability bookmarklet, Safari’s Reader functionality, and Instapaper. These services exist partly to free up content from having a single endpoint but they also serve to break content free from the shackles of stifling overwrought containers. This isn’t anything new, of course; we’ve been here before with RSS. But the existence of these new reader-empowering tools should be taken as a warning …and a challenge—how can we design for our content in such a way that the reader won’t need or want to reach for Readability or Instapaper?
