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Comment on Top Web Design Mistakes of 1999parent

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If I could have a tool to 1) remove all styling from a site, 2) reduce it to fundamental semantic markup (and here the HTML5 standard actually does provide a solid framework), and 3) apply my own preferred settings (fonts, margins, font-size, foreground/background colors) to every damned page, with minimal styling allowed, I'd be far happier.

Readability targets that use case.

https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets

Yes, and I use it for that, but:

• This requires JS enabled. Which I disable with ScriptSafe, so for a typical site, it's: enable JS, reload site, hit "read now" bookmarklet, pray that it actually opens.

• The page doesn't always render. In too many cases, the site simply fails to provide content to Readability. And since Readability's hidden their "feedback" button, I've got to hunt for that (or email them, which is better, since Readability doesn't provide feedback on feedback, even to the extent of providing an ack of your submission). After a few rough words with the crew I seem to be on better terms with them (and I really do love the tool and concept).

I realize this isn't the sort of thing that can easily be accomplished client-side, though sometimes I think it's still worth trying. People do the stupidest shit with HTML markup.

I did pretty much the same, but I always hunt for the print-able version of the page. If it's not there, use Readability.

If the output is still garbage, I use UnMHT, select the text / article then 'save as'.

If article's purposely set multi-page, tough luck, no solution to that yet ...

There's the depagination extension on Firefox. I'm not aware of similar for Chrome.

Another that works far too often is:

    lynx --dump <url> | less
... where I use the dump as less is far easier to navigate than lynx (never really could get used to it). w3m also works pretty well.

Or pandoc, which can fetch from URL and output to your specified format (another good way of bypassing craptastic Web formatting). Hrm...

Interesting. I get a TLS error attempting this on HN.

Holy crap, HTML through pandoc is a great solution. Thank you!

You're welcome.

I just discovered that reading through the manpage the other day ;-)

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