4 ms·

Does anyone know how difficult it would be to develop a reader view only browser?

actually_a_dog 5y ago
You don't need to. All you'd have to do is hack up one of the reader view extensions so that it's triggered when loading a page rather than by clicking a button.
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  I guess OP eyes a reader mode-only browser as an achievable milestone on the way to develop a browser (something sorely missing in "web standards" only serving to pull up the ladder), rather than as an app from a user PoV.
  - pipeline_peak 5y ago
    This, I could've been more specific. I basically just want to design a simple HTML4 (or doable parts of HTML 5 ) layout engine to render static documents and avoid any dynamic components.
878654Tom 5y ago
There are a couple of (not very popular) plugins that can set Reader view as default. One of them is Automatic Reader View[1] which has an option to to show all pages in reader-view. 1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-reader-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...
btdmaster 5y ago
Try about:reader?url=YOUR_URL_HERE. If that does not work, it means the URL does not support it.
- classichasclass 5y ago
  Sadly, no longer works on Firefox Android. I used to use this trick a lot.
betwixthewires 5y ago
Well, there's a few options out there for something like this, it depends on what you're going for specifically. There's Gemini and gopher, protocols designed around transferring and rendering plain documents. There are terminal based browsers like Lynx that render pages in a terminal, of course it's all text on your end. If you're talking about a GUI program to do what reader view does and only that, the reader view code is open source and available from Mozilla, I'm sure it wouldn't be much to build a webview app for mobile or a simple GUI that sits on top of curl or wget or something like that, fetches the page, processes a URL and renders the text. You're probably going to be manually entering URLs though, I'm not sure in the modern web how you even click from one site to another, how you even wind up at a URL for a written article using only reader view.
hansel_der 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30864714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30864714
phgn 5y ago
I think the problem here is not on the technical side. The places where we find stuff to read (aggregators, homepages, social networks) just don't work well if you're only extracting the text and links. There's also a huge long tail of parsing issues because web pages are not static documents. You'd want a fallback to the original HTML -- so why not use your main browser? There are extensions that activate reader mode automatically on pages where it's supported [0]. [0] I'm working on one of them: https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter

You don't need to. All you'd have to do is hack up one of the reader view extensions so that it's triggered when loading a page rather than by clicking a button.

tannhaeuser 5y ago
I guess OP eyes a reader mode-only browser as an achievable milestone on the way to develop a browser (something sorely missing in "web standards" only serving to pull up the ladder), rather than as an app from a user PoV.
- pipeline_peak 5y ago
  This, I could've been more specific. I basically just want to design a simple HTML4 (or doable parts of HTML 5 ) layout engine to render static documents and avoid any dynamic components.

878654Tom 5y ago

There are a couple of (not very popular) plugins that can set Reader view as default. One of them is Automatic Reader View[1] which has an option to to show all pages in reader-view. 1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-reader-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...

btdmaster 5y ago

Try about:reader?url=YOUR_URL_HERE. If that does not work, it means the URL does not support it.

classichasclass 5y ago
Sadly, no longer works on Firefox Android. I used to use this trick a lot.

betwixthewires 5y ago

Well, there's a few options out there for something like this, it depends on what you're going for specifically. There's Gemini and gopher, protocols designed around transferring and rendering plain documents. There are terminal based browsers like Lynx that render pages in a terminal, of course it's all text on your end. If you're talking about a GUI program to do what reader view does and only that, the reader view code is open source and available from Mozilla, I'm sure it wouldn't be much to build a webview app for mobile or a simple GUI that sits on top of curl or wget or something like that, fetches the page, processes a URL and renders the text. You're probably going to be manually entering URLs though, I'm not sure in the modern web how you even click from one site to another, how you even wind up at a URL for a written article using only reader view.

hansel_der 5y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30864714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30864714

phgn 5y ago

I think the problem here is not on the technical side. The places where we find stuff to read (aggregators, homepages, social networks) just don't work well if you're only extracting the text and links. There's also a huge long tail of parsing issues because web pages are not static documents. You'd want a fallback to the original HTML -- so why not use your main browser? There are extensions that activate reader mode automatically on pages where it's supported [0]. [0] I'm working on one of them: https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter