How does the Reader function of Mobile Safari in iOS 5 work? How do I enable it on my site. How do I tell it what content on my page is an article to trigger this function?
A lot of the answers posted here contain false information. Here are some corrections/clarifications:
The <article> element works fine as a wrapper; Safari Reader recognizes it. My site is an example. It doesn’t matter which wrapper element you choose, as long as there is one, other than <body> or <p>. You can use <article>, <div>, <section>; or elements that are semantically incorrect for this purpose, like <nav>, <aside>, <footer>, <header>; or even inline elements like <span> (!).
No headings are required for Reader to work. Here’s an example of a document without any <h*> elements on which Reader works fine: http://mathiasbynens.be/demo/safari-reader-test-3
I posted some more details regarding my findings here: http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/safari-reader
I've tested 100 or so variations of this on my iPhone in order to figure out what triggers this elusive Reader state. My conclusions are as follows:
Here is what I found had an impact:
Having around 200 or more words (or 1000 characters including whitespace) in the article you want to trigger the "Reader" seems necessary
The reader was NEVER triggered when I had less than 170 words; although it was sometimes triggered when I had 180 or 190 words.
Text inside certain elements such as <ol> or <ul> (that are not typically used to contain a story) will not count towards the 200 words (they will however be displayed in the reader if the reader is triggered for other reasons)
Wrapping the 200 words in a block element such as a <div> or <article> seems necessary (that said, I'd be surprised if there were any websites where that was not already the case)
For full disclosure, here is what I found did NOT have an impact:
Whether using a header or not
Whether wrapping the text in a <p> or letting it flow freely
Punctuations (ie removing all periods, commas, etc, did not have an impact)
It seems the algorithm it is based on is looking for p-Tags and it counts delimiters like "." in the innerText. The section (div) with the most points gets the focus.
see:
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Seems to be the base for the Reader-mode, at least Safari attributes it in the Acknowledgements, see:
file:///C:/Program%20Files/Safari/Safari.resources/Help/Acknowledgments.html
Arc90 ( Readability )
Copyright © Arc90 Inc.
Readability is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
This question (How to disable Safari Reader in a web page) has more details. Copied here:
I'm curious to know more about what triggers the Reader option in Safari and what does not. I wouldn't plan to implement anything that would disable it, but curious as a technical exercise.
Here is what I've learned so far with some basic playing around:
You need at least one H tag
It does not go by character count alone but by the number of P tags and length
Probably looks for sentence breaks '.' and other criteria
Safari will provide the 'Reader' if, with a H tag, and the following:
1 P tag, 2417 chars
4 P tags, 1527 chars
5 P tags, 1150 chars
6 P tags, 862 chars
If you subtract 1 character from any of the above, the 'Reader' option is not available.
I should note that the character count of the H tag plays a part but sadly did not realize this when I determined the results above. Assume 20+ characters for H tag and fixed throughout the results above.
Some other interesting things:
Setting for P tags removes them from the count
Setting display to none, and then showing them 230ms later with Javascript avoided the Reader option too
I'd be interested if anyone can determine this in full.
Both Firefox and Chrome have the similar plugin named iReader. Here is its project with source code.
http://code.google.com/p/ireader-extension/
Read the code to get more.
I was struggling with this. I finally took out the <ul> markings in my story, and viola! it started working.
I didn't put any wrapper around the body, but may have done it by accident.
HTML5 article tag doesn't trigger it on my tests. It also doesn't seem to work on offline content (i.e. pages saved on your local machine).
What does seem to trigger it is a div block with a lot of p's with a lot of text.
The p tag theory sounds good. I think it also detects other elements as well. One of our pages with 6 paragraphs didn't trigger the Reader, but one with 4 paragraphs and an img tag did.
It's also smart enough to detect multi-page articles. Try it out on a multi-page article on nytimes.com or nymag.com. Would be interested to know how it detects that as well.
Surprising though it may be, it indeed does not pay any attention to the HTML5 article tag, particularly disappointing given that Safari 5 has complete support for article, section, nav, etc in CSS--they can be styled just like a div now, and behave the same as any block level element.
I had specifically set up a site with an article tag and several inner section tags, in prep for semantic HTML5 labeling for exactly such a purpose, so I was really hoping that Safari 5 would use that for Reader. No such luck--probably should file a bug on this, as it would make a great deal of sense. It in fact completely ignores most of the h2 level subheads on the page, each marked as a section, only displaying the single div that adheres to the criteria mentioned previously.
Ironically, the old version of the same site, which has neither article, section, nor separating div tags, recognizes the whole body for display in Reader.
See Article Publishing Guidelines.
Here are APIs about how to read and parse: Readability Developer APIs. There's already a project you can refer: ruby-readability.
A brief history:
The Safari Reader feature since Apple's Safari 5 browser embeded a codebase named Readability, and Readability started off as a simple, Javascript-based reading tool that turned any web page into a customizable reading view. It was released by Arc90 (as an Arc90 Lab experiment), a New York City-based design and technology shop, back in early 2009. It's also embeded in Amazon Kindle and popular iPad applications like Flipboard and Reeder.
I am working on algorithms for cleaning web-sites from information "waste" similar to Safari Reader feature. It's not so good as readability but has some cool stuff.
You can learn more at smartbrowser.codeplex.com project page.
Related
Working with latest version of Ionic (3.x). I am working simply on programming an Ebook with almost 200 pages (in 4 languages).
I find not good to embed the whole html textes in a one <ion-content>. So I thought about a solution more sophisticated, such as dividing into chapters, so I am between 2 solutions (none of them works btw).
1. Use ng-include which after hours I found out that it is not more supported in Ionic (I hope I'm wrong).
2. Create a component for each chapter (the template is the chapter text wrapped in HTML). But I think that this one is performance-costly because at program launch there will be creation of many views of the components.
Any better advice?
I don't think I would try to load the entire book's content into the app. I would fetch content on an as-needed basis. You also need a solution that will scale with size of the device display, so the one-component-per-chapter idea is probably not the best choice.
(Additionally, I would take a step back and ask why the book isn't being distributed on already established platforms, e.g. mobi, ePub, etc. But this is outside of the scope of your posted question, of course.)
In the recent months, I've seen that many friends (many of them coders) started writing, long, elaborate mails with footnotes for link, meaning that they write paragraphs [1] and then [2] put the links at the bottom [3]. Like this.
[1] www.example.com/1
[2] www.example.com/2
[3] www.example.com/3
I think it is smart and everything, but I don't understand the process of putting the numbers while you write: I put the reference both when I write and when I edit the text, I swap paragraphs, thus I make a mess with numbers.
Is it a common practice used by some community or is there some editor/plugin that automatically puts the right number in footnotes? Is this mutated from Markdown?
definitely is not Markdown, that compile in HTML, so you should see an anchor instead of plain text.
I think could be an habit from people that want to send plain text mail (not HTML encoded) without use URL inside paragraph to keep readability.
Maybe influenced by Markdown emerging community, where square brackets are used for footnotes. Instead of wiki-markup or LaTeX that use curly brackets for footnotes.
For a quick example, check the very own StackOverflow flavored markdown for links.
Maybe you should also check W3C Web Annotation Working Group for some news.
I get the following errors from the Google Rich Snippet Tool for my website http://iancrowther.co.uk/
hcard
Warning: This information will not appear as a rich snippet in search results results, because it seems to describe an organization. Google does not currently display organization information in rich snippets
Warning: At least one field must be set for Hcard.
Warning: Missing required field "name (fn)".
Im experimenting with vcard and Schema.org and am wondering if I'm missing something or the validator is playing up. I have added vcard and Schema.org markup to the body which may be causing confusion. Also, I am making the assumption I can use both methods to markup my code.
Update:
I guess with the body tag, I'm just trying to let Google discover the elements which make up the schema object within the page. I'm not sure if this is a good / bad way to approach things? However it lets my markup be free of specific blocks of markup. I guess this is open to discussion but I like the idea of having a natural flow to the content that's decorated in the background. Do you think there is any negative impact? I'm undecided.
I am in favour of the Person structure, this was a good call as this is more representative of the current site content. I am a freelance developer and as such use this page as my Organisation landing page, so I guess I have to make a stronger decision of the sites goals and tailor the content accordingly, ie Organisation or Person.
I understand that there is no immediate rich snippet gains, but im a web guy so have a keen interest in these kind of things.
With schema testing, I find it easiest to start from the most obvious problem, and try to work our way deeper from there. Note, I have zero experience with hcard, but I don't believe the error you mentioned actually has anything to do with your hcard properties.
The most obvious problem I see, is that your body tag has an itemtype of schema.org\Organization. When you set an itemtype on a dom element, you are saying that everything inside of that element is going to help describe that itemtype. Since you've placed this on your body element, you are quite literally telling Google that your entire page is about an organization.
From the content of your page, I would recommend changing that itemtype to schema.org\Person. This would seem to be a more accurate description. Once you make that change and run the scanner again, you may see more errors relating to the schema and we can work through those too (for example, you'll probably need to set familname and givenName).
With all of that said, you should know that currently there are no rich snippets that you will gain from adding this schema data. Properly setting this up on your page, is only good to do, especially since we don't know what rich snippets Google or others will expose in the future, but currently you won't see any additional rich snippets in Google search results from adding these tags. I don't want to discourage you from setting this up properly but I just want to set your expectations.
I am thinking of converting my forum input textarea exclusively to TinyMCE HTML editor. I already have both options but it is a pain maintaining both and inserting images in textarea needs preview etc...
This is more of a general question. Do you think it is safe to include HTML editor (with all the safety measures like paste only text, filter for html not allowed etc...) as the only kind of editor on a forum? It's 2011 and machines are generally fast, connection are better.
What are the downsides of using HTMl editor instead of text field? I can not imagine a blog CMS to have "normal" textarea for input.
But for some reason on forums I do not see many html editors... Even the TinyMCE site has a textarea for their editor. So is there really something to watch out for and a no go...?
I know it is more of a phylosophical question, but I guess you have experience with forums, blogs, etc...
My site is about cooking and beeing able to insert pictures (and upload them) the easy way seems to be a big plus for our home cooks ;-)
If you don't consider security (you'll need to filter the HTML input on the server side so it won't contain anything dangerous), there's only the user experience left for consideration. On a forum you write text most of the time. There's seldom any use for more functionality than bold, italics and images. The solution used here on Stack Overflow addresses this by having a very limited set of functions, and applying it in the textarea with a sane markup language.
Other forums either use old software or didn't think the improved user experience was worth the effort. The textarea-only solution fits most forums well enough since most of the input is text-only anyway.
I do think you would benefit from HTML input. Make sure that only allowed HTML can be sent though, since the user can circumvent everything on the client side.
TinyMCE uses Javascript to add functionality to an existing textarea. If Javascript is disabled, then the user will be presented with a normal textarea anyway.
I would say it's relatively safe, as long as all input from the user is validated on the server before it's used for anything.
How do you put the Amazon Kindle web browser into Article Mode via HTML or Javascript?
Editor's note: Some pages are not automatically detected as "articles" by the Kindle 3 browser, and give an error message when trying to go into Article mode. What does the Article mode use to determine what portion of the page to display?
Is this related at all to Readability?
http://lifehacker.com/5163401/readability-bookmarklet-quick+formats-pages-for-smoother-text
Actual JavaScript code for Readability, which is heuristic based:
// Study all the paragraphs and find the chunk that has the most <p>'s and keep it:
This also appears to be related to Safari 5's Reader mode. Here is what is required for Safari Reader:
This definitely needs more investigating, but so far, these appear to be the most important factors for Safari’s Reader functionality to kick in:
Use the right markup, i.e. make sure the most important content is wrapped inside a container element. Whether you use <article>, <div> or even <span> doesn’t seem to matter — as long as it’s not <p>.
The content needs to be long enough. Use enough words, use enough paragraphs, use enough punctuation. Every paragraph should have at least 100 characters.
Reader doesn’t work for local documents.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/09/simple-tip-turns-kindle-into-ultimate-news-reader/ - The "f" key feature outlined above or some other feature? Not quite sure what article mode means.
It means that the browser will try to identify if the page you are looking at has a main body of text (is an article), parse it out and then display only that text without clutter and for easy scrolling.
I don't think you can force it via the web page's code
As far as I know, once the website has loaded (and if you are on an specific topic) you can turn on the "Article Mode" from the menu.
I've seen similar JS tools for Chrome too, so I assume it's part of webkit.