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> Essentially, "just pass me the bare minimum of response to make Firefox Reader View work." I wish it was possible to use a html meta tag to declare to the us

> Essentially, "just pass me the bare minimum of response to make Firefox Reader View work." I wish it was possible to use a html meta tag to declare to the user-agent that it should show the content in reader view. Then sites that only want to provide text and images and no ads etc could be implemented without any CSS at all and minimal amounts of markup and still be nice and readable on all devices thanks to user-agent reader view taking care of the presentation.

Technetium_Hat 8y ago
So you're really wishing that we had sensible default css, instead of the terrible user agent styles that we are forced to keep for compatibility.
- codetrotter 8y ago
  No, because that is not realistic for the exact reason you mention — that would break a lot of sites. Probably the vast majority even. And I don’t see any real benefit in changing the defaults either. Most sites want to provide custom CSS. The point of reader view is to make simple articles consisting of text and images comfortable to read on your specific device. Device/resolution specific defaults would be at least as painful, and probably more painful, to override for every site that wants to use custom CSS. Whereas an explicit meta tag telling the user-agent to use reader view is entirely feasible. Such a meta tag does not interfere with existing pages, requires nothing extra from sites that don’t want it, and would still fall back to something that works for all end-users whose user-agents don’t implement it (because browsers ignore meta tags they don’t understand so those browsers would render the page in the exact same way they would any unstyled page). And on top of that this theoretical meta tag would be really easy for browser vendors to implement — they parse the HTML, see the meta tag and trigger the reader view mode that they have already implemented.
  - redwall_hp 8y ago
    The solution is to stop respecting the style tag and enforce sane defaults that the user has control over. The Web was meant to be a means of creating academic documents with fancy citations in a tree structure, not a glossy magazine delivery mechanism.

Technetium_Hat 8y ago

So you're really wishing that we had sensible default css, instead of the terrible user agent styles that we are forced to keep for compatibility.

codetrotter 8y ago
No, because that is not realistic for the exact reason you mention — that would break a lot of sites. Probably the vast majority even. And I don’t see any real benefit in changing the defaults either. Most sites want to provide custom CSS. The point of reader view is to make simple articles consisting of text and images comfortable to read on your specific device. Device/resolution specific defaults would be at least as painful, and probably more painful, to override for every site that wants to use custom CSS. Whereas an explicit meta tag telling the user-agent to use reader view is entirely feasible. Such a meta tag does not interfere with existing pages, requires nothing extra from sites that don’t want it, and would still fall back to something that works for all end-users whose user-agents don’t implement it (because browsers ignore meta tags they don’t understand so those browsers would render the page in the exact same way they would any unstyled page). And on top of that this theoretical meta tag would be really easy for browser vendors to implement — they parse the HTML, see the meta tag and trigger the reader view mode that they have already implemented.
- redwall_hp 8y ago
  The solution is to stop respecting the style tag and enforce sane defaults that the user has control over. The Web was meant to be a means of creating academic documents with fancy citations in a tree structure, not a glossy magazine delivery mechanism.