The most underused browser feature: reader mode(frankgroeneveld.nl) |
The most underused browser feature: reader mode(frankgroeneveld.nl) |
[1]: https://techdows.com/2015/02/enable-test-reader-mode-firefox...
If the page is "good enough" when blocking ads (and I also have JS disabled by default), I won't bother using reader mode.
This is the only problem. When I really want it, it's often not available. archive.is is pretty bad on mobile because they are archiving desktop pages. Reader mode is not available there.
Then for sites you don’t want to use reader mode in, you turn ‘User reader automatically’ off in the site settings.
Will we say “that’s fine browsers should only focus on one thing”?
It used to be pretty bad but they've made it a lot better in the past few months.
It also has the benefit of storing the source url in the note and creating the new note from scratch which you don't get by copy/pasting into a new note.
View in reader mode --> Save as PDF --> Send to Kindle email address --> Sync Kindle.
I wish this could be automized.
Also I find the irony of reader mode quite funny. Lets build the most dynamic and capable presentation system so we can go relive bbs
It's good for downloading sites as PDF.
No dark mode, minuscule font, easy to mistap the tiny “buttons”, and no support for Reader Mode
I share several of your concerns. You can contact the mods directly at hn@ycombinator.com
One suggestion that is apparently in the pipeline is for a user-provided custom CSS which could be used to fix font, contrast, and other aspects.
The underlying structure of HN pages (nightmare table-based layout) makes more substantial revisions difficult.
There are numerous alternative-interface projects using the HN API as well.
Not just for better readability, but also most content behind paywalls is accessible with readermode.
(May be because, most of the paywalls on news websites load all initial content, and then either truncate the content or hide the content using javascript, and hitting the paywall renders the page again without a lot of the CSS and JS that is used for hiding the content behind the paywall).
Hopefully, this content doesn't have those paywall service providers to start working around reader modes.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...
I've found ad blockers to be more or less competent in removing the stupid European banners, but they are far from flawless. Some sites get stuck without a scroll bar for example
As for missing pictures, my argument is, either the text is referring to an image that cannot be seen in reader mode, then I'll notice and switch back to normal mode to see the image, or the image is not relevant to the text, so I just don't care for it.
This way I can see the text and pictures the way they intended it to be.
Another downside is that text content for other articles on the site that aren't part of the article, will be in the content. On the full site they'll be links or something and you just skip them with out thinking. In text to speech reader mode, it reads them off.
Images in online articles are irrelevant the overwhelming majority of the time --- 75%--95% or more. At best they're eye-candy or distractions. They occasionally provide context. Some serve as a contextual reminder. I'd suggest that information-critical graphics (there's information in the image that's not available from the article itself) are in the neighbourhood of 1% of all images. These tend to be graphs, plots, charts, or maps.
They're also generally rendered by Reader Mode, unless the site is very poorly designed.
TL;DR: This is an irrelevant concern.
I press it when there's a paywall.
I press it when the site doesn't do dark-mode.
I press it when adverts become annoying.
There also exists an auto-reader-mode plugin that you can tell to always open that site in reader-mode in future.
Reader mode is great. Hope it doesn't become popular so website start trying to stop it working.
This means that you can define an app-specific keyboard shortcut in Preferences > Keyboards > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts. Then click [+] and select Chrome as the application, then type "Enter Reader Mode" (exactly like it appears in the menu, and without quotes) and choose a shortcut.
I'd also recommend adding one for "Exit Reader Mode" since the option changes to this text once you are in reader mode. You can use the same shortcut, it's fine since the two options are never present at the same time.
This works for pretty much all apps, by the way.
In opera mobile you can save reader mode pages in mhtml, it's great alternative to webarchive
I don't use the automatic addons, but one that lets me right click and open directly in reader view, works a treat! https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/reader-view
Try them out!
However if we focus on the title, Reader Mode is a great feature (and I’m pretty sure many others followed by this title agree with that observation).
I use it mostly on my mobile devices and it can greatly improve readability of something by controlling the text-formatting.
Having said that, still many times (at least for me) it can resolve wrong translation for the content due to:
* ignoring some divs in the page * in-ability to move to next pages (eg. hyperlinks) * bad RTL support
I wish I would be able to use it more often. :)
It has become obvious that no user would willingly consent to the overuse of cookies since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has come into effect.
Here, I fixed that for you.
I am interested... also interested in if it gets past various paywall attempts....
Is there any way to get it on Android stock Chrome?
Printing is something I started to do some months ago. Instead of keeping the tab open for weeks, I decided I'd print anything I want to read and place it a physical "inbox".
Some tips: I print 2 pages to a side, so 4 pages per printer paper. Even long articles don't use too much paper, and for my eyes it's still readable (there are a few articles where I need to enlarge first). I print using either Firefox's "Simplify Page" feature or its "Readability" feature. This removes almost all the noise: No ads, no menus, etc. It's just the article and relevant images. Similar to reading a physical newspaper.
It's been a game changer. I can now read wherever I want. Going to the mechanic? I just take some of these printed articles with me. I find myself taking notes on the paper - something I would not do well on the computer screen. My eyes get a lot less strain. Once you get used to this, there's no going back. Now when I see an article through a web browser, it's just ugly. Too many distractions. Even the menus are annoying. I didn't realize I'd been putting up with filth for so long.
I initially worried that my inbox would get full and I'd have the same mental angst, and my plan was that if it happens, I'll take a random bunch and throw it in the recycle bin. But it never came to that - I still manage to read everything I print. Somehow, the physical inbox weighs less on my mind than the virtual one. I don't feel I need to deal with this inbox. It's OK if it just sits there collecting dust.
Bad for the environment. Good for the brain.
If you want to refer to another post, that's fine of course, but in that case use a link and perhaps add some new info if any is relevant.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Is this a new rule? I often find people copy/pasting older comments of theirs that is relevant to the current conversation.
I'll just open tabs on the browser of whichever articles or texts will consist of my morning reading diet that day and send them all to my Kindle. Very practical device to read and no more falling in a trap of continuous clicking on more and more links, while lending a crappy level of attention to the actual reading.
The nice thing about the Kobo is you can install your own software, so there's still hope for a better interface.
To be fair, I can (and do) do the same thing with my phone.
Paper > ereader > monitor > phone
Psst. Paper is a renewable resource and easy to recycle at least a couple times.
That's just bad for the environment two times lol
Its a huge waste of resources over time, but I find its much easy to focus and take in the information sitting at a table and reading over printed word.
I wonder if e-ink / paper devices might be able to replicate this now.
reading on my iphone or kindle doesn't seem to strain my eyes.
Six years of nopaste exhortations
> Paper is quite simple to recycle, yet 55 percent of the global paper supply comes from newly cut trees.
You can buy recycling paper too, it's not pretty but at least you know it's made from recycled materials.
Also, that page says we'll run out of fresh water in 18 years and the source is literally a single quote from one person. Seems a bit sketchy.
A modest e-book reader runs about $200. That's the cost of about 3 cases of 20# letter-sized paper (10 reams/case), or 15,000 sheets of paper.
At ~300 pages/book, that's about 50 books cost equivalent.
Note that printing output tends to run higher, at $0.01 -- $0.25 per page (higher for colour inkjet and laserjet).
Depending on ones reading patterns, the cost (and environmental impacts) of an ebook reader could well come out ahead. It's also generally easier to carry such a device than the equivalent number of printed books or documents.
That's not a minor consideration from me as I can easily fill 64--128 GB of total storage (about 30GB seem to be system + apps).
That's not all books --- I keep a fairly large number of podcast episodes downloaded. But at about 5 MB/book, even an apparently generous storage quickly shows limits.
I passed on the ReMarkable as its 16 GB storage (about 8GB available) only permits 1,600 books at 5 MB/book.
(And that's without podcasts or audio.)
The BOOX has a 64 GB onboard storage, maximum. I've got that near capacity in about 6 months, though a large share of that is podcasts. My preference would be 256 GB. Plus far better content-management capabilities on the device itself. I think I could live within that.
Retail cost is $20, falling by about half every 2 years. The minimising of eBook storage makes absolutely no economic sense.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27521248
Turns out I was wrong about security. Password recovery requires a separate cloud-based account. Setting a password does not.
Now I have a collection of user stylesheets I use with Stylus to improve sites I read a lot. I especially often remove fixed toolbars and adjust font size and line height. I also use the browser zoom feature a lot to get one-off sites to a better reading text size.
Well, actually I have my own hand-made reader mode that works with comments as well, implemented as a bookmarklet about 10 years ago. But other tools can't handle reddit and hacker news for reading aloud.
I tried flag in Brave ("brave://") but it is not working. Works great in Firefox.
And even then the options were confusing: 'Enabled' and 'Enabled available in settings'
I first tried with Enabled, didn't work. Then tried the settings option, which showed reader mode option under 'Appearance'. After turning on this setting, the icon shows up.
Is there some other way to force reader mode before the page load?
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.
chrome://flags/#reader-mode-heuristics
Accessibly has a "show simplified view" which seems comparable
Oh... I didn't know that! I mosty use FF and reader mode is a big reason why.
Reader mode is so much better for reading text... Also on mobile.
The only weird behavior (on FF) is that it's a step forward in history; whey you press "back" you don't go back to the previous page, but to the current page in normal mode (with zero info in the url bar or anywhere else (that I could find)).
So what does it mean when I either click the ‘X’ or simply do nothing and leave the banner there while I read the article? What does it mean when I use reader mode and basically ignore the question whether I accept them or not?
I used in the past mainly Reader View because it does not need access/injection to all your web pages https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reader-view/ecabif... another extension I used (which worked better sometimes) was a local copy/fork of Rocket Readability https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rocket-readability... I forked it because I code reviewed it and it needs access to all your web sites. I don't want any surprise update happen with that extension. Seems I still need it for foreign articles+Google Translate.
This used be the URL on Firefox for Android as well, but if I recall correctly (I seldom use reader mode) it got changed in the Fenix world so that it’s a moz-extension:// URL.
There really should be an option for "always let me try Reader Mode."
Also, I usually use Printfriendly.com to turn this page into a small pdf for saving. That is if it's worth saving, of course.
You can make your site and pages compatible with Instant View, also there are bots which can export pages to Telegra.ph which are also Instant View compatible.
I’ve found it the only way to stay sane on sites where ad blockers don’t work.
https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability
Original JS library:
https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability/blob/master/js...
Specifically see here:
https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability/blob/master/js...
What slightly but consistently bothers me, is that the reader view in Firefox has very little customization options and (in my eyes) doesn't look very appealing. They should let a designer improve the stylesheet. You also cannot force the reader mode like in Pocket.
I also want to mention the instant view feature of Telegram [0]. It can be used as a reader view as well.
Damn right. You can bet you ass Google doesn’t want to actively push users away from bloated pages filled with ads.
On Chrome, a startup named Speechify has a (crappy/intrusive) extension. They also have a decent iOS app, for ebooks, PDF and mobile web browsing... but their pricing structure is ridiculously expensive (also their annoying marketing feels like a giant ego trip/self promotional mania from the founder/CEO). However their voices are slightly better than the OS's.
I also stopped using reader mode for sites with insane ads/videos/js/popovers that hog the browser and just open them with per.quest/read/[URL] to extract just the article text.
Nothing worse than trying to position a long form text article and a pointless menu flap popping up to obscure the text. So you then have to perform another round of up/down to get the page in the right place.
It's not even as if modern browsers, either desktop or mobile, don't give you a way to quickly jump to the top of the page where you can see the menu.
A LOT of the time a webpage will be completely broken / filled with ads / javascript / and other useless garbage. One click and I'm in reader mode, and all that junk is gone and I just have nice clean text, and perhaps a couple of images. Makes me wonder if I can set reader mode automatically for certain pages.
I haven't used it in a couple of years, though, so I do not know if it is still around/maintained.
I've used FBReader, PocketBook (who sell their own ebook readers as well apparently), the NeoReader (default Onyx software), and have some familiarity with Kindle.
PocketBook enables some (but insufficient) metadata editing. The NeoReader has an excellent UI/UX generally on BOOX devices, but has no management capability.
I tend to have a large number of documents on my devices (1,000s). Management is critical.
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-only, sorry iOS fans.)
What it offers over standard browsers is that it's optimised for e-ink displays. That is, it favours pagination over scrolling, runs to full-screen, can easily adjust font size up or down (no more itsy-bitsy-teen-weenie-yellow-polka-dot HN fonts), bold text, and has its own reader mode as well.
Even on a standard tablet, some of these features are a huge step above and beyond the mainstream browsers.
The feature-set is limited, some of the UI is a bit rough, and a few things are just plain broken (if you need to edit entries in the JS or Cookie enabled/disabled sites ... you have to delete all data and start over again).
That said, my usage is evolving from sending individual pages to EInkBrow when I want to do long-form reading, to using it at least part-time as a primary browser. (Mozilla Fennec Fox is my first choice, still.) The browser is stable and very much usable despite this. The developer is responsive to requests and bug reports.
What's most refreshing is that the design principle is readability of Web content, as determined by the user, and not by the page author or publisher.
(regardless of how the website is structured, so deleting the CSS doesn't count)
https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB
On e-ink, the off-white / off-black colour palette is actually something of a probem, though the page otherwise remains highly readable.
From the original page, the lack of margins is a problem. Text running straight into the gutter is a readability problem.
For some web pages, deleting the CSS can help, sometimes not. Perhaps the way to go about such a thing is to consider mainly HTML, also considering CSS and ARIA to fix the layout (some web pages have forms that don't work correctly when CSS is disabled, but I have seen them have ARIA; an implementation could use ARIA to fix up any forms that are broken by doing so). So, while the CSS can be deleted, it still might need to consider it for some purposes, such as checking if something should be removed or formatted differently (e.g. emphasis, fixpitch, etc; HTML can specify such things too but it is not always done properly).
(That web page does have Google Analytics, with the comment "yes, I know...wanna fight about it?" preceding it, but you can just disable JavaScripts to avoid it.)
This is only true when your Web activity is limited to reading a static page of text, which is only one of many (albeit more common) use cases for the web.
I love reader mode too but the assertion that web design is never a solution to a problem is silly. Am I supposed to turn on reader mode on YouTube, Codepen, AudioNodes, an interactive tutorial, or a captivating experience website on Awaards.com? The modern web is so much more than text now.
Nonetheless, I agree... Most articles I read from HN would be intolerable or literally unusable without reader mode.
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.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301113
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.
A very long read but this covers everything:
> How to Section Your HTML
https://css-tricks.com/how-to-section-your-html/
These are specifically important for accessibility users.
Another short read:
> HTML5 sectioning elements, headings, and document outlines
https://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201103/html5_sectioni...
And you can use Markup Validation Service to validate and get tips:
https://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_input+with_options
Check out the excellent answer by Christian Kohlschütter on how readability works:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3652657/what-algorithm-d...
I'll also take the opportunity to mention that AnkiDroid works perfectly fine on E-Ink devices such as Nook. You don't even need root anymore, just install a launcher via ADB. I literally spend an hour every day on my Nook with AnkiDroid.
My preference is to read in EInkBro.
Pocket's craptastic pagination is endless frustration.
(I still use Pocket to save/tag content. But for what's supposed to be an enhanced readability tool, it's increasingly insufficient.)
Or what are some good e-ink devices for this I wonder?
So while this one won't work, there are options.
[1] https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable [2] https://toltec-dev.org/ [3] http://www.davisr.me/projects/parabola-rm/
Potentially in future, Linux-based devices which can run Android apps.
I'm not a particular fan of Android. Its application ecosystem is a bonus though.
Again, this is installable through F-Droid.
But if you want to get a sense of the app, it's possible to do so.
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/
The voices seem to dependent on something built into the OS. They sound okay on windows and I haven't figured out how to get them to sound good on linux. On windows the voices sound good, but I Wish I could get it to go a little faster. The voices don't sound human so it takes some getting used to.
On linux the voices just sound more harsh. To the point I don't want to use it. If anyone knows a switch to flip or how to install additional voices to make them sound better, that would be great.
Possible new safari feature: Make the text bold if reader mode is available
Click and hold the 'aA' button on the address bar and it will go straight to reader view without you having to go through the menu and selecting it.
Edit: it works only on older Firefox versions. This feature was removed sometime in the last months.
I feel like Pocket could use some updates, it seems underloved from the Mozilla team, especially for an app that purportedly generates revenue for the company.
I'm using the old Firefox on my main phone and it explicitly says "Saved offline" when I bookmark a Reader Mode page. The new Firefox on the backup phone says "Bookmark saved".
One more reason to stay on the old Firefox.
1. Bump up your font size. 2. Increase contrast.
I don't use Reader mode for readability, but to remove all the clutter on the page.
That means:
- Single-column layouts. Sidebars suck.
- No fixed-position elements. Especially not headers or footers, though fixed sidebars are also almost always a mistake. (There can be some benefit for reference / tools, but only about one time in a thousand that they're actually used.) On desktop, I disable all of these with either CSS (Stylish) or uMatrix element blocker. I've given up on any nuance here. If it's a choice of fixed header/footer or none at all, it's none at all.
- A static set of nav or informational links above or below the main article text is acceptable. It's present, but doesn't interfere with the reading flow.
- Put in a motherfucking scrollbar already.
It's like they are formatted for reading by teleprompter or something.
I think that would be even more important than the Private shortcut, with the amount of unnecessary crap the websites try to cram on your screen.
Just for the sake of curiosity, what do you think it would take for your addon to be ported to work also on Android?
Perhaps there is no need for both sticky and auto reader view settings. As soon as the user enabled auto reader view, you assume Sticky mode and enable auto reader view on any domains they subsequently visit (and render in reader mode successfully at least once?)
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 is one of the main arguments for competing with the web rather than trying to improve or fix the web.
By "competing with the web", I mean creating online services that take the attention of users away from the web for some subset of things the web is used for, e.g., consuming static textual content, also known as reading.
Gemini would be an example of an attempt to compete with the web, and it has the property that every page is essentially automatically in reader mode.
The trick is to find some desire that the web is currently bad at satisfying, then improving Gemini to cater to that desire. For example, TOR was created (many years ago) by the US military to give its employees a way to browse the web without revealing their browsing history to the spy agencies of the US's enemies. But maybe Gemini's much greater simplicity would enable it to make a stronger guarantee of user privacy than the web is able to guarantee. (The more complicated a web browser gets, the harder it becomes to make privacy or security guarantees -- particularly guarantees of interest to only a small fraction of the web's users.) If that were the case, then whoever needs that stronger guarantee would tend to become avid users and proponents of Gemini. Getting very small numbers of avid users is considered an effective way to start increasing the number of users of a new online service.
The idea I just described is probably a bad idea: there are probably other desires that Gemini or some other non-web service could cater to that are much more effective ways of creating avid users of that non-web service. (For example, the idea I just described has the disadvantage that even if the proposed improved version of Gemini could make stronger privacy guarantees than the web can (which seems unlikely to me) good luck convincing the average user who is not a security professional of that fact.)
Finding them is hard! But trying to find one is a more potent way to try to improve things IMO than trying to fix or improve the web is.
this happens so often that makes one wonder whether is due to some devs being lazy (hiding the actual content) or is by intent kept for savvy readers.
also does great job getting through nasty full-screen cookie consent banners.
basically is a glitter of hope for the web as a whole.
btw, was thinking about article like this one for some weeks now. great minds think alike, right :)
Neither, the business value isn't there, not enough people use Reader Mode to warrant spending the dev time to close the hole. It's coming soon though, and I'm building it. Sorry!
Sadly Firefox truncated similar feature. It's deal breaker for me. https://superuser.com/questions/468580/create-application-sh...
I wish more Chrome users use this to avoid the feature removed.
anyway, as i was searching for that i came across this article. i just skimmed it but it seems like feature might be coming back? https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-site-specific-browser-...
i think the ICE SSB thing is better though. it lets you add a custom icon and you can search/launch them along with your other desktop apps
What? The browser made by the company that derives 90% of its revenue from ads doesn't want to show you a button that can remove the ads? I am shocked!
: )
- uBlock Origin
- I Do Not Care About Cookies
The latter can also be configured for uBlock:
https://majkiit.github.io/polish-ads-filter/#i_dont_care_abo...
Now why can't websites just be written to work this way in the first place?
Refresh while in reader mode. The DOM with most paywalls is destroyed post-render, not before it reaches the web browser. Refreshing in reader mode prevents client side scripts from executing and rewriting the DOM. I'm presuming this is to be search engine friendly, but I'll leave it to the SEO experts to educate me.
This is what I do with most sites.
This has changed for most major sites. Users behind the paywall are served a "truncated" version of the article that never included a full version of it. The days of "press Esc before it finishes loading!" are coming to an end it seems.
The truncated version is still more SEO-friendly than a blank page as it has the headline and partial content.
F9 on Windows
I use it all the time.
command-shift-r on Mac/Safari
The only minor gripe I have is the slide-above animation when reader mode turns on. It's jarring when you keep getting that on each navigation.
Preferences > Websites > Reader > When visiting other websites: On
I don't know how it compares to Readability.js.
Check the codebase of some popular parsers:
Firefox (already mentioned): https://github.com/mozilla/readability/blob/master/Readabili...
Google Chrome: https://github.com/chromium/dom-distiller
Mercury parser: https://github.com/postlight/mercury-parser
We use these in our own tools and also get contributions from others, including Wallabag users: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag
Before it was sold, Instapaper used to have something similar. A public database of its site-specific extraction templates. We used that as the starting point for our repository.
Edit: Oh neat it does actually. https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/wiki/Configuration#...
> Archive method SAVE_READABILITY
> Extract article text, summary, and byline using Mozilla's Readability library. Unlike the other methods, this does not download any additional files, so it's practically free from a disk usage perspective. It works by using any existing downloaded HTML version (e.g. wget, DOM dump, singlefile) and piping it into readability.
ArchiveBox and the other stuff from the "DIY no-credentials don't-care-about-the-rules" web archiving community, like ArchiveTeam.... continues to astound me with it's quality and "professionalism" (as a credentialed professional in the field of digital library stuff... they are often outdoing the actual credentialed professional community).
Washington Post, I'm looking at you mofos. Chief reason I'll seek out any alternative news site for archival. It's been this way for about a year, if not more.
https://github.com/ushnisha/tranquility-reader-webextensions
Though I guess this extension is less useful now that many sites are purposely breaking reader mode.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...
EDIT: I figured it out. I needed to install speech-dispatcher.
On Ubuntu
> sudo apt install speech-dispatcher
The voices are awful to listen to, though.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h...
It's available on iOS too which uses the built in reader mode of safari.
On the whole I think I'll stick with Harmonic, but it looks like it has some potential.
I'm not super fond of having to run any particular background service for this.
> Gemini is not intended to replace either Gopher or the web, but to co-exist peacefully alongside them as one more option which people can freely choose to use if it suits them. In the same way that some people currently serve the same content via gopher and the web, people will be able to "bihost" or "trihost" content on whichever combination of protocols they think offer the best match to their technical, philosophical and aesthetic requirements and those of their intended audience.
Gemini file format also could be usable independently of the protocol, although I do not know of any implementations.
I think that sometimes you might want to use Gemini without TLS (it is good they have it, but I am not sure that requiring it is so good), so my proposal is to make the new URI scheme "insecure-gemini:" for this purpose. In this mode, client certificates won't work, so TLS will still be required if you want to use client certificates.
Also, unfortunately curl is not implementing Gemini protocol; adding that might help to increase its usage too, since then you can at least download files from it easily. However, I have seen discussions and some of them are valid concerns. For example, I think -k should not be the default; doing it different for different protocols doesn't seem like good to me. You can still specify -k yourself if you want to do. Also the patch does not implement redirects, even if -L is specified; it ought to be fixed to allow -L to work. Allowing longer URLs might also help.
Furthermore, a better web browser will need to be made, excluding half of the stuff and implementing the other half of the stuff differently, before adding some more.
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 reading experience?
In any case, I imagine that a ML powered Reader Mode engine would perform significantly better than a semantically powered engine. It should be fairly straightforward to train a ML model to make a visual distinction between the actual content, and the ads and other garbage that pollutes webpages. Crowdsourced training data would increase the accuracy even further, while limiting the ability of developers to defeat the reader mode.
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
I'd actually prefer a placeholder "we couldn't render this", which leaves the tagging tools available, to redirecting to the remote site.
For readers, it will be necessary to fix the implementation to do the working better, since not everyone will write it properly.
I used this feature a lot as it was mainly manuals that I was saving.
They also replaced the default start page to be Collections instead of bookmarks, which b of course for me was empty.
I think I've got used to the new layout that I probably won't downgrade just for the offline capabilities.
My app has reply push notifications too which I don’t think any of the other HN apps have.
As for the font, Product Sans is not legally allowed to be used by third parties as far as I am aware:
https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/102262/can...
My app allows you to change fonts too and it supports Montserrat font which looks visually similar to Product Sans.
I still remember the time when user styles were a first class feature built into all browsers. Hell, that 'C' in CSS - "Cascading" - was always there to allow styles to enhance/override prior styles, including allowing the user to override website's styling. Back before web designers ruined everything by making every web page into its own special snowflake, people thought users would have one or two default CSS sheets to choose from and apply to any webpage, the way we today think about "dark mode".
These days, we have to resort to using browser extensions. A well-known one is Stylus [0][1]. In a way, it's much better than old built-in user styles. But then, it's not built in. Still, it's a nice way to fix up some of the frequently visited websites.
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[0] - https://github.com/openstyles/stylus
[1] - Mind the name, it's "Stylus", not "Stylish" - the latter used to be popular, but then it sold out and become another peace of surveillance capitalism detritus. Stylus is a GPLv3 fork of Stylish with data collection removed.
1- https://www.ghacks.net/2020/10/01/you-can-now-install-any-ad...
What do you fallback to if the rule is not present or doesn't work?
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.
Also, I hate the yellow.
(Am I the odd one out here to prefer cold light to warm light? Warm light makes me seriously sleepy. But everyone I talk to, they all prefer to have warm lightning in their homes. And like with home lightning, I feel the same about webpages. On HN I got used to warm colors over the years; everywhere else I hate them.)
But seriously - great job!
Given how big of an impact good sleep (or lack thereof) has on my physical and mental health I am in the latter camp too, using a red filter on my screens even during day-time, but everyone's situation is different.
Cold light is much closer to natural sunlight than warm light. So working in a warm-lighted environment can be seen as being deprived of the blue parts of the spectrum that should be there. Blue light keeping you awake is a feature because the natural environment in which we evolved is saturated by it during the day.
I use blue light filters on my screens too, but they're timed to turn on around sunset. Ideally, everyone would have adequate access to raw sunlight during the day, but that's not the case for many (myself included) - whether because they live/work in a city, or because it's overcast weather, or both (like me, right now).
And no, you don't have to fucking love all my shit
The background colour's the 2nd CSS rule (followed immediately by text). If I were to redo the page, I'd have a media query for colour depth and set those to #fff and #000 respectively for B&W screens anyway.
(I don't have the login handy for that CodePen account presently.)
I'm aware that HN has multiple levels of penalties applied to sites / domains, for various reasons. Users may also flag inaccessible content. (I certainly do.)
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Notes:
1. If you've determined that "etc." is doing much heavy lifting here, congratulations. The resources listed are highly encouraged.
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.
What drives me insane: website with floating header and footer, and I read, then hit space to scroll down to the next "page", but it doesn't take into account what's hidden behind header and/or footer, so now I'm missing two lines, and have to grab mouse/arrow keys to scroll back up two lines. It just works and then you put in extra work to make it not work thank you very much arghhhhhh
I don't expect anyone to follow it 100%, but the gist is that the page layout shouldn't look too different from browser defaults or use advanced features.
You mean you want two scrollbars? One from the web page and one from the browser window. That seems like an odd choice.
Worse: the scrollbars which do exist are indicator-only, they cannot be used to actually navigate on the page.
On the four mobile devices I routinely have access to, none has an actual grabbable persistent scrollbar for navigation.
Oh, and yes, on Chrome on Android I can see a tiny scrollbar when scrolling, but I can't interact with it.
The fixed side bar on the "visiting" page is barely enough to fit on the display, and when I shrink the window (or increase the text enough), bottom items get cut off without recourse.
The banners on most pages are so big that I usually see only 1 line of an article, which is mildly annoying.
Note: disabling JS is a required part of making the web readable for me, and that's how I perfomed the review.
The website should work exactly the same without JS (sans fancy parallax). However I'm curious about your screen resolution. The header is meant to leave plenty of text above the fold.
Stylus is a useful CSS manager.
Stylish is a piece of malware that spies on you.
Isn't that against Google's own policies? I think they call it cloaking.
It's unfortunate as the platform was clean and does do some things well (Markdown and quite nice image display).
It managed to kill off an active discussion community quite effectively however. With an effectiveness that strongly suggests intent.
Believe me, it's annoying for me as well even to visit and link back my old content from there.
More, if you can take the pain ;-)
(plus I happen to treat blue light filters as an "default with opt-out possibility" kind of setting in general)
My current home office has a ceiling light fixture with three slots, adapted to low-wattage incandescents. I've plugged in three Hue bulbs I had sitting in a drawer, and tuned them to full intensity and color temperature as close to natural daylight as the bulbs can get. As a result, the lights almost always outshine the available daylight. I feel pretty comfortable with this temperature and intensity. Plus, my eyestrain reduced a bit, as the difference between room lightning and computer screen brightness isn't that big anymore.
On evenings, my color filters kick in on the screens, and I either kill two of the three bulbs, or bring their color temperature down.