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Rolling the Boulder Uphill: How Matter Approaches Parsing

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One of a reading app’s most important jobs is converting unruly web pages and email newsletters into “reader view” — a beautiful, distraction-free interface optimized for reading. At Matter, the benefits of “reader view” are not merely cosmetic. They include critical functionality like offline support, dark themes, accessibility, text-to-speech, progress tracking, and annotation. As such, it’s important that we parse pages accurately. (For those new to the term, “parsing” is the process by which we extract the important elements of content – title, author, date, body text, images, captions – and jettison the distractions and boilerplate, like ads, menus, promotions, and email forms.) Parsing is a trickier problem than it might first appear. The challenge comes from the near-infinite surface area of the web. In such an unconstrained environment, it’s tricky to “read” a web page like a human would. To separate real content from boilerplate, we use a variety of layered heuristics and tech

Rolling the Boulder Uphill: How Matter Approaches Parsing Rolling the Boulder Uphill: Rolling the Boulder Uphill: How Matter Approaches Parsing One of a reading app’s most important jobs is converting unruly web pages and email newsletters into “reader view” — a beautiful, distraction-free interface optimized for reading. At Matter, the benefits of “reader view” are not merely cosmetic. They include critical functionality like offline support, dark themes, accessibility, text-to-speech, progress tracking, and annotation. As such, it’s important that we parse pages accurately. (For those new to

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