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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

It's a mess by design. In an ideal world no browser would need a reader mode, because pages themselves would be reader-friendly by design. Page authors, of course, are instead more interested in optimizing for advertising and tracking. Reader mode, much like adblock extensions, works directly against their interests.

In fact we wouldn't even need any new web standards to implement something like this. Any website following the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and using the correct page structure and aria- tags should be fully semantically parsable and displayable in any format or medium.

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There was a lot of stuff/buzz around the semantic web in the early 2000s.

I’ve been out of web for a long time but it seems to of mostly died with the advent of React and the single page web application. Now it looks like everyone apart from public government sites with strict accessibility requirements just don’t bother putting the effort in.

I think SEO is a large reason why popular sites do bother with semantic tagging.

True, but at the same time there's an incentive against making semantics too good. The separation of data from presentation competes with the need/desire to monetize.

For example, somebody had build an app that scrapes free recipes from the web, so that it's shown without ads and the ridiculous fluffy lectures that are typically part of it.

Great for users of that app, not so great for the recipe authors depending on this model.

This is also why RSS is dead. Both Twitter and Facebook had it before, but killed it. You don't want to give away your goods for free.

It's easy to put this problem at the recipe bloggers or Facebook, but we're just as responsible for this. We don't want to pay for anything so it's ads. Then we avoid and block ads.

We lack a payment culture.

Unsolicited advertising should be made illegal.

Then there'd be no reason to optimize the web to serve up ads, because legally you couldn't.

The world needs to switch away from advertising for the good of humanity.

Hey, fine with me. But do come up with an alternative monetization strategy.

Paywalls, donations, selling a service, kickstarters, have something physical to sell, etc..

These are (sometimes) good solutions for highly specific high value offerings, but that still leaves some 95% of the rest of the internet to cover ;)

This is one of the problems, and it might be the biggest problem with the modern web, but it's not the only problem. Non-experts are bad at producing remixable content.

* A significant number of people do not really use file names. https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna...

* Twitter offers no official way to make bold or italic text, but some people make it work using math symbols. They either don't know, or don't care, about all the accessibility and search tooling this breaks.

* Try downloading a C program off the internet and compiling it on anything other than the original developer's computer.

In none of these cases does anybody benefit from the lack of usable metadata, yet nonetheless the metadata doesn't exist.

You're absolutely right. The vast majority of web content goes undiscovered because it lacks any and all metadata.

I'm sure they can live without my views. If I can't read the page I can always press the back button. I'm not going to buy anything from any ads anyway so no loss on either side except a few seconds of time lost for me.

Just got a link to a documentation for an API that I can't read because of too low contrast. Dark Reader plugin nicely fixed it so didn't even have to try reader mode. It sucks to get old anyway, you young people don't have to make it worse. You will be in the same seat in 20-odd years so plan for it :-)

"I'm not going to buy anything from any ads anyway"

The purpose of ads is often to get you to just recognize the brand (and/or associate positive feelings with it) so that if you are ever in the market for their products you'll be more likely to choose their brand over a "no-name brand" (ie. one that you haven't seen ads for).

So you might think you're immune to advertising, but you probably aren't.

Yes, That's why I use adblockers everywhere but that sometimes breaks the page and then I press the back button.

I offset these impacts by actively avoiding brands I recognize from unsolicited ads, and I encourage everyone to do the same.

"In an ideal world no browser would need a reader mode, because pages themselves would be reader-friendly by design."

This would happen if page authors just participated fully in the Semantic Web.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

"sometimes known as Web 3.0"

The future we could have had, but did not get

But now we're getting Web3 instead, with blackjack and blockchains.

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