Technics: Previewing links: iReader is a flawed but invigorating approach to live-links previews

With this edition of refWrite Backpage's column on technical topics, our columnist wishes to announce the change of his name from Owlie Scowlie to Technowlb.

I found very interesting info on iReader, a new Firefox extension that allows you to hover your pointer/mouse over a live link on a blog-entry on your browser, for which pause before clicking, you are rewarded with an imperfect preview of the content of the page you are considering clicking to read via the live link. In other words, you won't have to waste your time if the new page doesn't really interest you upon previewing it momentarily.

Technotes, by Owlie Scowlie / Technowlb

iReader is something like Snap and a small number of similar previewers. However, iReader is based on a different technical approach. It scans and summarizes the linked page, and gives a summary of the concepts of that page's content. And there's the problem, a very cretive problem indeed. Sometimes in its present stage of develpment the new Firefox extension can't do justice to the semantic task is has undertaken. ireader is semantics based! As a bonus, the new extension works (but not yet perfectly) on all webpages and both for Windows and Macs (sorry, I don't know yet if it can handle Linux at all).

The full name is iReader Web Previewer. I'm not sure whether refWrite will adopt this previewer (or any other for that matter); but the technical considerations are certainly intereting for pointing the way to a possible future for one or more or all of our rW present 5 pages.