Marco.org

Brent Simmons:

I was there because I just wanted to read something. Words. Black text on a white background, more-or-less. And what I saw — at a professional publication, a site with the purpose of giving people something good to read — was just about the farthest thing from readable.

The original purpose of Instapaper was just saving links for later reading. I had to add the Text view to actually make them readable as I was alpha-testing the service in late 2007.

Four years later, decluttering and restyling is more necessary than ever for far too many sites. And that’s truly sad. People shouldn’t need to install special tools or design entire services to comfortably read the text in web publishers’ layouts.