Readability

Hmmmm… someone’s written a little script that reads a Web page and computes a readability level for it. It’s selling itself by publishing a link to a company that sells loans (“cash advances”) in the code that displays the shield shown here. (I excised that code, but one can probably find it elsewhere when one sees a similar shield.) Anyway, I wondered what algorithm was employed in determining the readability level. Had I more time, I’d scour the Web in search of an explanation. Had I even more time, I’d construct a group of Web pages that were sensitive to different readability formuli and run the test against each of them….sigh.