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Consider blockquote in article scoring#979

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tuyafeng wants to merge 1 commit into
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tuyafeng:patch-1
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Consider blockquote in article scoring#979
tuyafeng wants to merge 1 commit into
mozilla:mainfrom
tuyafeng:patch-1

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@tuyafeng

@tuyafeng tuyafeng commented Aug 25, 2025

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Some pages have long quoted sections but only a few lines of commentary or intro. Right now, isProbablyReaderable ignores blockquote, which can make the examples below score 0 (the default options), whereas including blockquote would give a score of 9.

Example from W3Schools:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

<h1>The blockquote element</h1>

<p>Here is a quote from WWF's website:</p>

<blockquote cite="http://www.worldwildlife.org/who/index.html">
For 50 years, WWF has been protecting the future of nature. The world's leading conservation organization, WWF works in 100 countries and is supported by 1.2 million members in the United States and close to 5 million globally.
</blockquote>

</body>
</html>

I’m thinking it might make sense to factor blockquote into the scoring. If not, I’d love to hear the reasoning—thanks!

@gijsk

gijsk commented Sep 24, 2025

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Apologies for the slow response - I was out on PTO and then heads down on some other work for a while.

@tuyafeng Can you provide a "real life" example (rather than w3schools) of pages that currently don't get detected as readerable as a result of this omission?

For context, the only real tradeoff here is for performance - the more tags included, the longer the "readerable" determination takes, and it's designed to be faster (and more "rough guess") than running a full readability pass, if that makes sense.

@gijsk gijsk closed this Jul 9, 2026
@gijsk

gijsk commented Jul 9, 2026

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Closing given the lack of response here, to try to get a grip on the pile of PRs here.

@tuyafeng

tuyafeng commented Jul 11, 2026

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Sorry for the late reply. I completely forgot about this PR, and a lot has happened over the past six months.

I’m still not sure whether this change is the best approach. It does make the detection process slightly slower, but it seems necessary for some websites:

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/3/josh-w-comeau/
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/8/kenton-varda/
https://www.sgfox.cc/archives/via-shisui.html

Maybe we could introduce an option in the options object to control this behavior (for example, an includeTags field). This would make the implementation more flexible and leave room for future extensions.

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@tuyafeng @gijsk