Hacker News Reader

Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Hey, five filters contributors: I’m a big fan of you work. How hard would it be to make a web proxy type service that produced static html with working links instead of a PDF?

The idea is to strip out all of the JavaScript before it even hits the client. People could then use it exclusively for news reading. I suspect it would reduce bandwidth and client side energy as well as block essentially all web trackers.

I ask because it looks like you’ve done most of the heavy lifting between this and your full-text RSS feed service.

Thanks!

View on HN

This sounds interesting! Some product _landing_ pages are not readable without Javascript. With this you could at least figure out what the product is about.

Once I'm enrolled I can enable Javascript when the product makes use of it. :)

How about Readable-Web Proxy?

https://github.com/fake-name/ReadableWebProxy

Tracking can be done with <img> tags and (recently) with CSS.

The idea is that everything would run through a normalizing presentation layer (like the PDF converter and RSS full text services do), and only the information needed for rendering would be sent to the client, so <img> would be rewritten to some other url and served by the proxy.

The main problem I see is that you can embed trackers in the link URLs.

(You probably want the proxy to be a stateless cache shared by many users, which prevents tracker stuff from persisting in whatever rendering engine it uses for the conversion)

Thank you for the kind words.

We haven't really thought much about running this kind of thing as a proxy service, or what it would be like to implement it. Our tools are really intended for web articles, so they will fail on lots of other kinds of content you'll encounter in day-to-day browsing. If the intention is to avoid trackers, the proxy will have to handle everything, and not everything will be web articles. Browser extensions might be best here.

For my personal browsing habits it wouldn’t be so bad. Basically, I just check a few news aggregators (like HN) and sites that have rss feeds anyway, so support for HN would get me most of the way there. I’m not sure how many news aggregators are in common use, but I’d guess covering a dozen would get most of the addressible market.

Thanks for the response!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com