Outline makes articles more readable instead of making them worse by adding a metric ton of ads and trackers.

Outline is better from a moral standpoint and closer to say (but not quite) the internet archive.

My bad. I totally missed the ads and trackers part (because I use uBlock Origin).

only if you have js enabled, otherwise it's a blank page

I think what outline does would be much harder to implement without JS. As it stands, it seems to take parse the URL, fetch the page with a specific UA / some other magic, then automatically format it, without having to store anything on disk and without having to generate static html. Wouldn't this be much, much harder without using JS?

> without having to store anything on disk and without having to generate static html. Wouldn't this be much, much harder without using JS?

While it's possible to do without storing anything on disk (strange requirement imo - but you can keep it in memory on the server if you really want), it's a lot more practical to do this work in the backend. And that's also what outline is doing:

outline's frontend will do an AJAX request to outline's servers to actually fetch the article from a blog and serve that back[1]. So they could do this easily without frontend javascript. But I think the UX would suffer on many levels. Having a frontend in javascript allows outline to do better caching, better user experience, etc. The only downside to using JS is that it doesn't work for people still in 1995 and for people who disable their javascript.

[1]: example fetch call: https://outlineapi.com/v3/get_article?id=6ps979

edit: fixed typos

>but this is practically quite similar to how outline works

Not at all. Outline doesn't essentially present the content as their own.

Neither does Saowen.com. Above the title you can see:

> 2018-12-20 nickmchardy.com

The difference is that the link in Saowen.com directs to https://www.saowen.com/source/site/nickmchardy_com, whereas the one on outline goes to the source.

I fundamentally disagree that this is effectively attributing the content.

The more they are talked about the higher google and other search engines will rank them

I get the idea of back links. But I doubt our small discussion on HN would have much impact given it already copied thousands of posts at this point.