It’s available as a Firefox extension and as a bookmarklet that works in any browser. Through a simple set of keyboard shortcuts (press h to see them), you can manipulate any item on a web page – the most useful functionality being to remove elements, or to isolate them.

How is this useful? It can be invaluable when printing content from the web.

Invariably, the information you want to print is surrounded by ‘computer administrative debris‘, to use a phrase coined by Edward Tufte. Menus, comments, headers, footers, the list goes on – all of this is useful when you’re navigating through a website, but it’s mostly redundant when you’re reading it on paper. Some sites provide print stylesheets that optimize the page for printing, but many don’t – and that’s where Aardvark comes in handy. You can just highlight the section of the page that you’re interested in, isolate it (therefore removing all other elements from the page), and you’ve got a very printable and readable page.

It’s a bit tricky to describe in text, so the best thing to do is give it a spin yourself!

Firefox extension: http://karmatics.com/aardvark/
Bookmarklet: http://karmatics.com/aardvark/bookmarklet.html

The guys at arc90 have taken this idea and produced a simple bookmarklet that sits in your bookmarks bar, with the aim of making almost any web page ‘readable’ with just one click. It doesn’t work with every website, as it has to try and work out where the main content of a page is, and some sites prove a bit too tricky. When it does work, it’s great for pages that I’m finding difficult to read, but don’t want to add to my Instapaper queue.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For those times when you just can’t focus on that web page for very long, this is a really useful little tool.

You can get the bookmarklet here: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ (you can also customize it to your needs), and read arc90’s blog entry about it here: http://lab.arc90.com/2009/03/readability.php.