Over the weekend I hacked a bit with a friend of mine, and I learned a lot about readability and javascript.
Readability is a measure of how difficult a text ist to read. It is interesting that there are very simple methods that surprisingly accurately estimate readability only from very few statistics of the text, like number of words, number of sentences and number of syllables.
We decided to implement a number of different readability metrics in Javascript. This will allow many interesting applications, like editors giving feedback about your readability or interactive comparisons between articles of different newspapers.
The weekend was quite successful, and the result can be found on GitHub. Also I incorporated it into this blog, so on the right hand side there is now a readability score shown for every blog post.