How to put the Amazon Kindle Web Browser into Article Mode

Question

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?

Cusick

Can you give examples of pages that "work" and pages that "don't work"? – Unseal

Please see Support “Article mode” on the Kindle for further discussion and examples. – Aircondition

Answer 1

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.

Juncaceous

Answer 2

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.

Glorianna

This seems like the right answer, but the key is that it's a NEW feature of the NEW (Webkit-based) browser in Kindle 3 – Dereism

yes and he seems to want to control it from the outside. Don't know if that is doable as Jamie points out. I'm sure you can detect the browser type, but force it? dunno... looking into it more. – Glorianna

Answer 3

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

Alfredoalfresco

Answer 4

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.

Dysteleology