Lukas Mathis has written a great piece on Safari Reader. If you’re not familiar with the feature, it’s new in Safari 5. Using a keyboard shortcut, a panel slides up, containing the content of the article you’re reading, stripping everything else. In many cases, it also manages to stitch together multi-page articles automatically. The typography in Safari Reader is suspect, but the idea itself is what’s caught the attention of many people, who are proclaiming it to be the Worst Thing Ever (Ars Technica seems particularly miffed).

The reason for the anger is because Reader strips the ads, the branding, and everything apart from the content. As Mathis notes, though: “If your users are using a third-party product to make your product usable, you are doing something wrong.” That is a sentence that every single content provider on the web should read several times, digest, and, if necessary, write in permanent marker on both hands.

Something like Safari Reader shouldn’t be necessary, but it is, and that’s because the majority of content providers now offer such a poor reading experience online, burying content in amongst dozens of ads, or splitting up small articles across dozens of pages, in order to maximise ad impressions. This is a hateful, cynical, user-hostile approach, and it’s precisely because of this that the likes of Reader and the wonderful Instapaper exist.

In my life as a web designer, I’ve watched in horror as companies have forced clean, efficient designs to mutate into nasty ad-infested, unreadable disasters. The questions “Can’t we get at least one more ad above the fold?” and “Can we make the text smaller, so we can fit more on the screen?” still fill me with horror. And I’m constantly baffled by online publications that see fit to split a 20-item gallery of tiny images over 20 slow-to-load pages.

I’m not saying ads are inherently bad, nor that they should be removed from every website. Just don’t make them the focus. And in some cases, splitting articles in a sensible manner can actually aid usability, even taking into account the ‘infinite’ height of web pages. Just make sure that if you’re involved in any aspect of creating a website that you don’t make the user’s experience so bad that they feel compelled to use third-party technology in order to easily read your site’s articles.