Sunday, March 27, 2011

Skimmer: The HTML 5 version of the NYT

The NYT is experimenting with HTML 5 at www.nytimes.com/skimmer/. I tested with Safari, the site stores 10MB locally to begin services.

I didn't like the way the fonts rendered on OS X Safari, but Windows users will probably do better (sadly, Windows' font technology is better than Apple's). The site is very responsive; it caches many page ingredients locally.

This is hardly revolutionary. In the days of 2,400 bps modems AOL was responsive because all the graphics elements ran off a 3.5" 720K diskette. It's taken a long time, but HTML 5 has brought us back the late 80s.

I had no trouble highlighting text and creating a blog post from the text. I suspected that might be blocked, but for now copy paste works.

The site is not glitch free. If a page doesn't render, don't wait. Hit refresh.

Worth a look.

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