No really, it's an article.
December 1, 2019 2:23 PM   Subscribe

I'm writing an app to get around Pocket's insistence that articles are not articles. But what do they use to determine something is an article?

When I save pages to Pocket, I frequently get the well-known "This page doesn't appear to be an article and therefore may not display well in the Article View" error. This makes the app useless, especially because it disables Pocket's text-to-speech which is my main reason for using Pocket. I wrote an app that will temporarily turn a URL or bunch of text into a very basic web page that can then be shared to Pocket. The app is working in the sense that it will grab a page or text and output it in a way I can share to Pocket, but apparently I'm not adding the correct HTML tags (or something) because Pocket still says it's not an article. Does anyone know what differentiates a wall of text from an article according to Pocket so I can add those tags or metadata or whatever and convince Pocket to display the wall of text in Article View?
posted by Tehhund to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
The Pocket Article View API is currently only open to partners that are integrating Pocket specific features or full-fledged Pocket clients” — so it seems you may have to be a trusted partner to get your pages saved as articles.
posted by scruss at 2:58 PM on December 1, 2019


Best answer: I don't use Pocket but it occurs to me that one of the elements added in HTML5 was <article></article>.
posted by XMLicious at 3:15 PM on December 1, 2019 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: Wrapping it in <article> tags works sometimes. If I carefully select, copy, and paste the content into my app, <article> works. If I just give the app a URL it blindly treats all HTML as the article, so all kinds of junk gets wrapped in <article> and Pocket rejects it. That's probably the best I can expect without lots of work on my part to correctly identify which part of the HTML is the body/content, so I'll stick with copy and paste.
posted by Tehhund at 3:49 PM on December 1, 2019


Do the web pages Pocket works properly with contain <article> tags? If so, they went through the same thought process.
posted by XMLicious at 2:58 PM on December 2, 2019


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