Quisby

Increasingly, people that like to read stuff online are splitting into two camps:

Those who will read almost anything, almost anywhere, within any environment
Those who seek a pleasant reading experience, consistently presented, without being bombarded by ads and ridiculously paginated articles

For those of us seeking a non-sadistic reading experience, we may as well go fuck ourselves, because nobody cares about us. Websites publishing original material are only getting worse: ads, multiple pages, full-page interstitial ads, awfully designed pages, horrifically intrusive ads, and so on. Our only refuge has become the print stylesheet.

More or less a standard offering now, it provides a much more barebones reading experience with little extra cruft, very little advertising, and generally a much more readable article. They also work a lot better with tools like Instapaper and Readability.

But even the print stylesheet doesn’t offer a perfect experience every time. I’ve been curating the Editor’s Picks on Instapaper’s homepage for months now, and I’ve noticed some trends:

A lot of people are heading to the print stylesheet. The majority of articles that come through the submission queue (populated with articles bookmarked a certain number of times) already point to the print version.
Although a print view should offer a relatively consistent reading experience, it frequently does not.
The way various publications format their print stylesheets actually varies surprisingly widely.
There are still major publications that do not even offer a print view.

With that in mind, I did some Real Science on print views, and created this handy chart of how competent various publications’ print views are. (I just noticed that I forgot to do Newsweek, but I can vouch for it being excellent!)

Here’s a quick explanation of each criteria I looked at:

Exists: Does a print view even exist?
Third Party: Are they using some shitty third-party to generate print views? (There is only one, and it is incredibly shitty. On my first day doing Instapaper’s Editor’s Picks, Marco warned me never to post anything that used it for its print view.)
New Page: Links not opening a new tab/page/window is generally considered good practice. A lot of publications do not follow that practice.
Ads: Are there ads? For this, I only counted ads that obstructed the content in some way.
Single Page: Is it a single page? Print views should be a single page, every time. Nobody I looked at violated this, but I’ve seen people that do.
Print Dialog: Some print views use Javascript to automatically pop-up a print dialog. Super annoying and unnecessary.
Readable: This is a purely subjective criteria. Basically: is it readable? Mostly, all it had to do was have a sensible line-height, max-width, and font size.

This is by no means a comprehensive list — and I mostly excluded blogs (including only a couple of widely-read-in-their-industry ones) — just a list of publications a lot of people read and rely on for news. I also excluded publications that are mostly subscriber content only.

Some of the results are surprising — wasn’t expecting so much green! — and some of the results are not (eat a dick, Techcrunch and Mashable).

Enjoy.

NB: Thanks for the assistance, everyone. (Sorry that you can’t actually see any of the answers. I’ll put that theme code back in some day. Maybe.)

NB 2: You’ll note that Salon’s row reads FUCKYOU. That’s because Salon’s website is fucking terrible, and I didn’t even make it to an article — never mind a print view — before getting too annoyed to continue. I opened the home page and was greeted with an interstitial that filled the entire viewport, and then loaded a video with sound that auto-played. Fuck you, Salon.

NB 3: Ok, I forgot Newsweek and Ars Technica. Newsweek’s print view is excellent. Ars Technica’s is shitty: their print view only shows the current page of the heavily-paginated article, and makes you pay for a single page.

05th February 2010 • 29 notes • commentary