Question / Alert on Reader View in Safari

TidBITS Talk
1

I have promoted the use of Reader View in Safari (I’m at version 12.1) for viewing web pages without the intrusion of advertisements. I even, for some web sites, set Safari Preferences so the site comes up in Reader view and I don’t have to use Command Shift R to invoke it.

However I have discovered that Reader View does not present some web pages with the full text. It often starts at the 2nd or later paragraph

For example, here are two screen shots from the Wall Street Journal

The first is before Reader View is activated. Note that the 3rd paragraph begins with “But many . .”

Original%20
Original .jpg1280×838 250 KB

Here is the Reader View of that web page. The 1st two paragraphs are missing

Reader%20View
Reader View.png1280×714 541 KB

I don’t know if this is a recent “improvement” but now do NOT automatically use Reader View

Jerry

2

What Safari’s Reader View and its equivalents have a challenging task, to differentiate the essential content of any web page. Because sites use HTML code in wildly different ways and most fail to use semantic code well, if at all, Reader View is bound to make some mistakes.

I don’t know why it’s making this mistake on this particular article (" State Medicaid Tax Trap"), it’s leaving out the paragraphs that precede

but another opinion article published the following day (“Blue-State Politics Are Eroding Little Rhody’s Big Reforms”) has that div in roughly the same place but includes the paragraphs that precede it.
3

Thanks. It is not for every page. And not just the WSJ

I posted it to warn people that if they print or email a Reader View that information at the start may be missing.

Jerry

4

I have had instances where the text is cut off after a few paragraphs.

I use Reader View for the same reason you do - it’s the only way to read the internet these days.

Diane

5

Another Reader View fan. Not only does it minimize distractions, I can set the font to a size I can comfortably read.

Other tools offer the same path, and share the same risks of not capturing all the text you want to read.

6

I was / am a promoter of Reader View. Wanted to warn people about the issue

Jerry

1 Like
7

Hi Adam

Maybe you can figure out what happens and it might explain my problems with Reader View in the Wall Street Journal. I admit it might be my computer (2017 iMac at mac OS 10.14.8) but I think it is a Reader issue and the code at web pages

When I do Reader View on this article I lose the two images AND the link to the original article. It doesn’t matter whether Reader View in Safari OR the share as email.

I’m going to try to include screen shots of Safari window

Jerry

Nomal browser

image
image.jpg1520×1924 599 KB

Reader View

image
image.png1452×2062 303 KB

8

It happens when I try too (macOS 10.14.6, Safari 12.1.2). Reader Views (not just Safari’s but equivalents in Firefox, browser extensions, etc.) makes guesses as to what’s the real content and what to clear away; sometimes they guess wrong. Looking at how this short TidBITS article is coded, there’s no clear reason why Reader View should cut it off; maybe ending with an image with a link around it makes the image seem like an ad.

Apple doesn’t document Reader View’s heuristics so it’s worth little of publishers’ time to figure out how to compose their articles to ensure the wheat is completely separated from the chaff. Of course, some publishers actively try to prevent Reader View from working, it puts ads out of sight as well as things like a “Related Articles” list that could entice someone to spend more time on a site.

Safari’s “Use Reader automatically” has been a real boon for me on the most cruft-laden sites; I only enable it for ones that are an assault on the eyes, if I don’t decide to simply avoid returning to them.

9

Thanks Curtis. Agree with you that it is how the originator codes. Most ot the WSJournal problems are when text is wrapped around a graph or image

Jerry

10

Unfortunately, as @cwilcox said, Reader View is a complete black box, so there’s no way we could code our Web pages for it even if we wanted to. All I can suggest is to send feedback to Apple.

11

I use pihole at home. If I’m away from my own network, NordVPN also has a setting to block ads. That’s not my primary function of NordVPN, but nice feature to have.

I have also noticed this thing about the Safari Reader function. When first released, it would also try to get multiple pages from sites that spread an article over multiple pages (e.g. camera or operating system reviews). But I think that feature became unreliable over the years.