Status Update 5 of Reader Mode for desktop Firefox

This post was guest authored by Matt Vorce, one of the students working on the reader-mode project.

Since the last time we met we made quite a bit of progress with regards to getting content from Readability.js. We were able to click our reader mode button and get the reader content for a given page and display it in an alert message.

Our current goal is to move this content in to the about:reader page. Currently we are looking into how to import/access functionality from aboutReader.js so we can add functionality on top of the aboutReader.html.

During the meeting we discussed that we need a way to run privileged code on top of the aboutReader.html. The HTML file does not have access to the information needed to retrieve the results we receive from Readability.

Mobile handles this problem by first taking the result from Readability and appending it as a private property of the tab instance. The aboutReader.js is then able to find that tab through a distinct ID and grab the result data. We need to look into similar functionality for desktop.

A few things that we need to keep in mind moving forward:

• There will be three paths for retrieving content for about:reader.
• Using a cached result retrieved from Readability.
• When a cached result doesn’t exist load the content in the background first
• Retrieving the information from the reading list

This week we need to look into importing aboutReader.js. Mobile does it via “lazy loading” but desktop may do it differently. Once this is figured out we can use aboutReader.js to act as privileged code on top of aboutReader.html in order to retrieve our results from Readability and display the appropriate content.

Also we should look into logging information to the console over using alert messages.