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The most underused browser feature: reader mode

frankgroeneveld.nl

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Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#301

Post by k1m »

mft_ wrote: post #239
k1m wrote: post #70

Any developers who'd like to contribute to improving how article content is extracted from web pages should check out Mozilla's Readability repository: https://github.com/mozilla/readability I'm currently trying to bring the PHP port up to speed here: https://github.com/fivefilters/readability.php We use an older version as part of our article extraction for Push to Kindle: https://www.fivefilters.org/push-to-kindle/

O/T, but thanks for Push To Kindle. I found the browser version so useful I bought the iPhone app - both to use and also to support you. Brought a whole new field of usefulness to my Kindle

Thank you! That's really nice to hear. (Appreciate the support too.)

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#302

Post by k1m »

freediver wrote: post #237
k1m wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In our case, we try to match using the XPath selectors that we have for the site. If we don't have any, or they fail to match anything for the title, author, or body, we then go to Readability and let it do its thing to try and extract whatever we're missing.

Makes sense. What does 'prune' and 'tidy' instruct parser to do?

Prune instructs the parser to remove any elements within the extracted article block that look superfluous. This can result in false positives, so we tend to disable it when we've gone to the trouble of creating site-specific extraction rules.

Tidy determines if the source HTML should be cleaned up first with HTML Tidy - https://github.com/htacg/tidy-html5. If you're parsing the source HTML with an HTML 5 parser, as we are now, it shouldn't be necessary any more (I think we actually ignore it now). We used it more before when we relied on libxml parsing, which often trips up on modern HTML.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#303

Post by matheusmoreira »

mywittyname wrote: post #112
illegalmemory wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the little feature of reader mode I love is, if you time it correctly (before loading all javascript of the page) you can skip a lot of prompts ( subscribe to read / monthly limit reached and so on )

It's only a matter of time before sites start rolling out anti-reader mode "features."

It's already happenning. Just like adblockers, anything that makes life better for users is actively fought against.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#304

Post by matheusmoreira »

satellite2 wrote: post #185
rawling wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely that's just any halfway-competent pay/sign-up wall, rather than specifically anti-reader mode?

Not necessarily as they still want to be referenced properly. The workaround was to whitelist Google's spider ips and remove the paywall for those but with the progress of other search engine / social nets it's more complicated to paywall without hurting SEO.

> The workaround was to whitelist Google's spider ips and remove the paywall for those

Isn't that against Google's own policies? I think they call it cloaking.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#305

Post by k1m »

dredmorbius wrote: post #278
peterlk wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can I implement my website such that it is optimally useful for browsers like this? Just avoid flashy stuff? Is there any way to list my blog somewhere as a friendly place to read? I'm spinning it up again after a year off for reasons that I will probably write about :)

I've just poked through both the GetPocket site ( https://getpocket.com/publisher/ ) and Mozilla's Readability Library GitHub page ( https://github.com/mozilla/readability ) without seeing obvious guidelines. My general suspicion is that adhering to a simple HTML5 documemnt structure, and possible use of microformats ( https://microformats.io/ ) goes a long way. Update: there's some discussion here: https://news.ycom…

I haven't seen guidelines lately, but Readability.com, before it was shut down, did have a page that's archived here: http://web.archive.org/web/20160301180825/https://readabilit...

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#306

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

What do you mean, 'underused'??? I can't live without it and use it for almost anything, where it works! Not works to read comments on HN, unfortunately. It also helps against most register-to-read popups, and against advertising-infested websites that fool all adblockers.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#307

Post by munk-a »

peterlk wrote: post #274
dredmorbius wrote: post #211

I'm a huge fan of Readability Mode and use it often. It's proof that Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. For those who are using e-ink devices, or even just standard tablets, EInkBro is another immensely useful tool. Yes, it's a standalone browser, not a mode on Firefox, Safari, Vivalti, etc. https://github.com/plateaukao/browser (Available through Google Play, F-Droid and other sources. Android…

How can I implement my website such that it is optimally useful for browsers like this? Just avoid flashy stuff? Is there any way to list my blog somewhere as a friendly place to read? I'm spinning it up again after a year off for reasons that I will probably write about :)

Adhere to the actual semantic meaning of HTML5 tags and browsers will handle the rest - honestly. So long as you're not using JS to swap in hidden content and CSS to arbitrarily reorder content flow then even aria hints are pretty unnecessary - but adding the relevant aria attributes will make sure that screen readers have an easier time.

Not abusing the tags solves pretty much everything at this point because the browsers can't trust anyone. Just read up on HTML5 and how tags should be used... then follow that.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#308

Post by hollerith »

spideymans wrote: post #295
hollerith wrote: post #170

The main reason reader mode is "underused" is that for a substantial fraction of pages, it does not work. Because of the way the human motivational architecture works, if there were a reader mode that always worked, its rate of usage would be many times higher than the usage rates of the current crop of reader modes. But of course, there is no way to create a reader mode that works for all web pages -- and that fact…

>But of course, there is no way to create a reader mode that works for all web pages -- and that fact is one of the main arguments for competing with the web rather than trying to improve or fix the web. Web developers go out of their way to break Reader Mode. What incentive would they have to create content for a platform that competes with the web, which actively limits their ability to deliver ads and degrade the…

>Web developers go out of their way to break Reader Mode. What incentive would they have to create content for a platform that competes with the web, which actively limits their ability . . . ?

It is unrealistic to expect most publishers of web pages -- or even most publishers of mostly-static text-heavy web pages -- to put their content on a competitor. It is still worthwhile IMO to try to steal from the web 1% or 2% of the web's user-hours ("person-hours"?) and that can probably be done (over say 5 years) with a small fraction of the web's static textual content (plus a little content that is not available on the web).

My guess is that the largest beneficial effect (on the world) of doing that will be to convince more people that the web is a mess (by showing them a less messy alternative even though they will continue to spend most of their online hours on the web).

Technically inclined people and people who used the web (or maybe Usenet) in the 1990s either already know that or cannot be persuaded of it regardless of what we do, but perhaps the most important effect of stealing 1% of the web's user-hours is convincing more people outside of those 2 groups of it.

P.S. I have already noticed the potential for machine learning to help users of the web: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27856814

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#309

Post by woldemariam »

badhrink wrote: post #269
woldemariam wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for Edge. Use it on my Macbook and love how it highlights the sentence it is currently reading and scrolls the page down automatically. It is not as good as Google Assistant on android. Google Assistant on android knows to skip past image captions and ads, and it knows when it has reached the end of an article; Edge simply reads everything it sees.

How to activate this in Google Assistant? Is there a special application or something? Or do we just have to say "Ok google read this " ?

open a page you want to be read in Chrome, active google assistant and say 'Read It'. It also works with other Chromium based browsers (Brave and Edge).

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psEX5jPkYiw

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#310

Post by Arnavion »

aimor wrote: post #138

Firefox USED to allow accessing reader mode by prepending the url with 'about:reader?url='. This doesn't work anymore and I don't know what to use instead. There is a reader mode button that toggles it on and off, but some websites redirect or change the content before I can click the button. Sometimes the button just doesn't appear (why not, reader mode usually works fine). Refreshing the page sometimes works, if th…

>Firefox USED to allow accessing reader mode by prepending the url with 'about:reader?url='. This doesn't work anymore and I don't know what to use instead.

Prepending `about:reader?url=` works for me, but only for pages that Firefox shows the button on anyway. For pages where it doesn't show a button, prepending `about:reader?url=` says "Failed to load article from page", which is to be expected because...

>Sometimes the button just doesn't appear (why not, reader mode usually works fine).

... the Reader Mode script uses heuristics to identify if the document has an article. So it can't work on a document where it can't find an article to extract.

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