↬ Clean reading hope
2013-05-25I haven’t noticed Maclean’s “clean reading mode” before. It appears to be more than a year old, though :
Here at Maclean’s, we appreciate the written word. And we appreciate you, the reader. We are always looking for ways to create a better user experience for you and wanted to try out a new functionality that provides you with a reading experience in which the words and fonts take centre stage. We believe you’ll appreciate the clean, white layout as you read our feature articles. But we don’t want to force it on you and it’s completely optional. Click “View in Clean Reading Mode” on any article if you want to try it out. Once there, you can click “Go back to regular view” at the top or bottom of the article to return to the regular layout.
At first glance, it appears that the designers over at Maclean’s can count on a certain power to experiment with the way the articles are presented, which is good news for anyone with an interest in well-written words presented in a compelling way. The clean reading mode seems to be well done and the wish to let “the words and fonts take centre stage” is a noble intention.
Several implementation details are also interesting :
- This is treated directly with CSS, so there is no way (that I know of) to bypass the normal view and to link directly to the “clean reading mode”. Therefore, no ad impression is lost by this. A smart move if you want to prove a point without being contradicted by “the numbers”.
- The “clean reading mode” strips the comments out of the article. This sure provides an argument for those who wish to part with comments altogether : they are not part of a “clean” reading experience.
- It looks as though Maclean’s have a plan to monetize this. No need to be a wizard to guess what this little piece of HTML in the source code means :
<span id=”sponsortext”>We hope you enjoy this clean reading mode:</span>
I’d be curious to see what Maclean’s have in mind with this : surely, the aforementioned sponsortext would fetch higher rates than a mere banner ad. Their way of exploiting this “clean reading mode” could certainly provide hope for a healthy change in the monetization of news on the web.