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
In popular desktop ebook viewers like calibre, FBreader or Cool Reader, I'm missing a feature to show ebooks in the same pagination as their printed counterparts. Some people (here, too) claim that epub does not have a page concept (e.g. at how to implement 'page break' in epub reader).
But this is not true. From http://www.idpf.org/accessibility/guidelines/content/xhtml/pagenum.php:
"If an ebook is produced from the same workflow as a print document, print pagination markers should be retained in the document. These markers benefit readers in mixed print/digital environments, such as a classroom, as the page numbers allow a common point of reference between the two editions." and from its FAQ-section: "Do page numbers really matter anymore? - Yes. Despite the assertions of the futurists and technophiles, print still reigns supreme. As a result, anyone in a mixed print/digital environment — using an assistive technology or not — needs a way synchronize electronic and print content."
I tested several ebook viewers with two different documents that contain page break tags, but they did not break up into pages (or I'm missing a preference option). Any help, infos are highly appreciated.
You can force page break with CSS and the property page-break-after=always but is not the best page layout for an ebook. For example add a class to your epub:type="pagebreak" label with that style.
<span epub:type="pagebreak" id="page23" class="pagenumber">23</span>
.pagenumber { /* other styles*/ page-break-after=always !important; }
Site for writers and readers, both groups will be non-technical users (writers will be familiar with BBCode already, but I can choose other markup). Writers will write guides using markup tags to embodied info. Readers will be presented with parsed text. Tags will be expanded to some info.
Number of tags needed as well as info tied to particular tag will change. So they can not be hard-coded.
I'm looking for any interpreter that can use tags provided at run time, for my next Ruby on rails app. Anyone know such?
Edit: Yeah. I'm not looking for views markup, but for forms textarea markup to be used by website users (to format their guides, but I do need ONE markup for formatting, and embedding info).
Based on my current understanding of your needs, I recommend mustache. This is described as a "logic-less" template processor. It doesn't have programming logic, simply run-time replacements.
Here's one way to use it (from the github readme)
Given this template (winner.mustache):
Hello {{name}}
You have just won {{value}} bucks!
We can fill in the values at will:
view = Winner.new
view[:name] = 'George'
view[:value] = 100
view.render
Which returns:
Hello George
You have just won 100 bucks!
I am trying to make a print newspaper that is easily generated from my WordPress site. I am trying to design the print template for it, but in order to control specific pages, I need to use the #page rule.
I read this tutorial, which suggests methods like:
#page :left {
#top-left {
content: "Cascading Style Sheets";
}
}
But when I try this in Firefox 5 (and Chrome 14) print-preview or print, it does not print anything at the top-left. In fact, I can't seem to do anything within the #page rule.
Am I doing this wrong or is this a CSS3 feature that just hasn't been implemented yet?
Just after the preface, the tutorial states:
Web browsers are good at dealing with pixels on a screen, but not very good at printing. To print a full book we turned to Prince, a dedicated batch processor which converts XML to PDF by way of CSS. Prince supports the print-specific features of CSS2, as well as functionality proposed for CSS3.
So, the tutorial code isn't meant for use with a browser's print function in the first place.
In any case, as I said in my comment, I wouldn't count on any browser implementing this yet. Everyone's crazy about the stuff happening on screen like animations right now.
Tagsoup is interfering with input and formatting it incorrectly. For instance when we have the following markup
Text outside anchor
It is formatted as follows
Text outside anchor
This is a simple example but we have other issues as well. So we made tagsoup cleanup/formatting optional by adding an extra attribute to textarea control.
Here is the diff(https://github.com/binnyg/orbeon-forms/commit/044c29e32ce36e5b391abfc782ee44f0354bddd3).
Textarea would now look like this
<textarea skip-cleanmarkup="true" mediatype="text/html" />
Two questions
Is this the right approach?
If I provide a patch can it make it to orbeon codebase?
Thanks
BinnyG
Erik, Alex, et al
I think there are two questions here:
The first Concern is a question of Tag Soup and the clean up that happens OOTB: Empty tags are converted to singleton tags which when consumed/sent to the client browser as markup gets "fixed" by browsers like firefox but because of the loss of precision they do the wrong thing.
Turning off this clean up helps in this case but for this issue alone is not really the right answer because we it takes away a security feature and a well-formed markup feature... so there may need to be some adjustment to the handling of at least certain empty tags (other than turning them in to invalid singleton tags.)
All this brings us to the second concern which is do we always want those features in play? Our use-case says no. We want the user to be able to spit out whatever markup they want, invalid or not. We're not putting the form in an app that needs to protect the user from cross script coding, we're building a tool that lets users edit web pages -- hence we have turned off the clean-up.
But turning off cleanup wholesale? Well it's important that we can do it if that's what our usecase calls for but the implementation we have is all or nothing. It would be nice to be able to define strategies for cleanup. Make that function plug-able. For example:
* In the XML Config of the system define a "map" of config names to class names which implement the a given strategy. In the XForm Def the author would specify the name from the map.
If TagSoup transforms:
Text outside anchor
Into:
Text outside anchor
Wouldn't that be bug in TagSoup? If that was the case, then I'd say that it is better to fix this issue rather than disable TagSoup. But, it isn't a bug in TagSoup; here is what seems to be happening. Say the browsers sends the following to the client:
<a shape="rect"></a>After<br clear="none">
This goes through TagSoup, the result goes through the XSLT clean-up code, and the following is sent to the browser:
<a shape="rect"/>After<br clear="none"/>
The issue is on the browser, which transforms this into:
<a shape="rect">After</a><br clear="none"/>
The problem is that we serialize this as XML with Dom4jUtils.domToString(cleanedDocument), while it would be more prudent to serialize it as HTML. Here we could use the Saxon serializer. It is also used from HTMLSerializer. Maybe you can try changing this code to use it instead of using Dom4jUtils.domToString(). You'll let us know what you find when a get a chance to do that.
Binesh and I agree, if there is a bug it would be a good idea to address the issue closer to the root. But I think the specific issue he is only part of the matter.
We're thinking it would be best to have some kind of name-to-strategy mapping so that RTEs can call in the server-side processing that is right for them or the default if it's not specified.
Is there a way to remove blank pages appearing between two chapters, in Appendix?
Your problem is that all chapters, whether they're in the appendix or not, default to starting on an odd-numbered page when you're in two-sided layout mode. A few possible solutions:
The simplest solution is to use the openany option to your document class, which makes chapters start on the next page, irrespective of whether it's an odd or even numbered page. This is supported in the standard book documentclass, eg \documentclass[openany]{book}. (memoir also supports using this as a declaration \openany which can be used in the middle of a document to change the behavior for subsequent pages.)
Another option is to try the \let\cleardoublepage\clearpage command before your appendices to avoid the behavior.
Or, if you don't care using a two-sided layout, using the option oneside to your documentclass (eg \documentclass[oneside]{book}) will switch to using a one-sided layout.
it is very easy:
add \documentclass[oneside]{book}
and youre fine ;)
I tried Noah's suggestion which leads to the best solution up to now.
Just insert \let\cleardoublepage\clearpage before all the parts with the blank pages
Especially when you use \documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{book}
frederic snyers's advice \documentclass[oneside]{book} is also very good and solves the problem, but if we just want to use the book.cls or article.cls, the one would make a big difference presenting your particles.
Hence, Big support to \let\cleardoublepage\clearpage for the people who will ask the same question in the future.
If you specify the option 'openany' in the \documentclass declaration each chapter in the book (I'm guessing you're using the book class as chapters open on the next page in reports and articles don't have chapters) will open on a new page, not necessarily the next odd-numbered page.
Of course, that's not quite what you want. I think you want to set openany for chapters in the appendix. 'fraid I don't know how to do that, I suspect that you need to roll up your sleeves and wrestle with TeX itself
In my case, I still wanted the open on odd pages option but this would produce a blank page with the chapter name in the header. I didn't want the header. And so to avoid this I used this at the end of the chapter:
\clearpage
\thispagestyle{plain}
This let's you keep the blank page on the last even page of the chapter but without the header.
I put the \let\cleardoublepage\clearpage before \makeindex. Else, your content page will display page number based on the page number before you clear the blank page.
One thing I discovered is that using the \include command will often insert and extra blank page. Riffing on the previous trick with the \let command, I inserted \let\include\input near the beginning of the document, and that got rid of most of the excessive blank pages.
You can also use \openany, \openright and \openleft commands:
\documentclass{memoir}
\begin{document}
\openany
\appendix
\openright
\appendixpage
This is the appendix.
\end{document}