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wpears / spree

Read without moving your eyes.
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Pause when media content is reached #4

Closed Jure-BB closed 10 years ago

Jure-BB commented 10 years ago

Suggestion: Pause Spree when media content (picture or video) embedded in the text is reached. This would be great for articles with graphs, pictures etc.

Another thing that would be nice, but a bit trickier, would be to pause when table embedded in the text is reached. Pause at table should have an option to turn on/off since some webpages still use tables for design purposes and may present compatibility problems.

Thanks for already great extension!

wpears commented 10 years ago

I'm a little hesitant to address this issue wrt pausing specifically. Instead I may skip tables(checking a node's tagName) as Spree isn't really a good way to understand them. I'll likely do this for images and video as well so captions don't come in out of sync.. in each case I'll probably have to recursively descend on every node encountered, checking tagNames... not too bad.

wpears commented 10 years ago

Skipping implemented in latest commit. I feel like pausing is a bit contrary to the purpose of the application.. namely to read things in a focused and efficient manner. Especially when you consider that this is dependent on any site's content structure, a site formatted unexpectedly (strange hidden imgs everywhere, etc.) could render Spree completely unusable. With that in mind, closing.

Jure-BB commented 10 years ago

Maybe only pausing at pictures bigger than some minimum dimensions would partly help with that problem.

I understand, its double edged sword. This kind of feature would need to be optional to be useable. It's just that often if there are pictures in an article, reader has to stop and also "read" the picture or graph to really understand what the text is saying. Pausing manually and restarting Spree at the first paragraph after the picture is kind of a hassle, because its almost impossible to know when Spree passed the picture.

Focusing on paragraph highlight line while reading is hard and slowing you down. I often didn't notice I skipped picture until I wasn't completely comprehending what text was saying anymore. And by that time I was already way into next paragraph. I had to stop. Check the picture. And restart the whole last paragraph. But that is just my case where pictures were important to understanding of the text. Anyhow, we have a saying here that goes never look a gift horse in the mouth. :) So thank you for even taking time to read this. :)

wpears commented 10 years ago

I'll keep that in mind, I'm likely going to introduce a small customization pane for the extension, and I'll include this as an option (along with initial text speed, color, etc.).

mijoharas commented 10 years ago

there is one more similar item, code blocks, adding the option to pause at a <pre> tag could be helpful (similar to the tables idea). Spree is not very good at reading code (at least in my opinion, I need to see whole lines to make sense of things, I'd be amazed if anyone could use it for that!) so the option to pause at code tags would definitely be a big help for my use case (basically reading the articles from hacker news).

wpears commented 10 years ago

After some thought I will reopen this issue. When I get some time this afternoon I will implement auto-pause for pre tags (which I find the text depends on more than other media). I would probably also do automatic pausing for tables if it wasn't for legacy sites that use tables for layout.

wpears commented 10 years ago

Fixed in latest commit re: pre tags.