Somehow I found time to knock up an API to the readability Analysis provided by Juicy Studio
This page posts the url entered in a form to a server script and returns an HTML page. The aim is to turn this into a service which can be called with a URL and which returns just the analysis as XML or an HTML fragment.
Only fair to use it analysis this blog:
The service is a short XQuery script running on eXist. The key function uses the httpclient module:
declare function assess:readability($url) {
let $form :=
element httpclient:fields {
element httpclient:field {>
attribute name {"url"},
attribute value {escape-html-uri($url)},>
attribute type {"string"}
}
}
let $response := httpclient:post-form(xs:anyURI("http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php#readingresults"),$form,false(), ())
return
if ($response/@statusCode eq "200")
then $response/httpclient:body//table[@summary="Table to display the readability results"]
else ()
};
With a bit of code to produce the interface,we have an API.
I took the same function and built it into a script which iterated over all the pages the students had produced and generated a full results table. Now to see if these measures really tell us anything about the quality of the pages.
Of course I'm sailing a bit close to the wind with this use of a website without, as yet, the authors agreement.